circleshooter
Ultimate Member
In a thread a while ago in the shotgun forum someone asked about range etiquette and whether one should pick up their empty hulls when done shooting. Naturally, my personal reply was yes - and - at the least one should pick up their waste and put it in a trash barrel for disposal. I shoot at Loch Raven Skeet & Trap Center pretty much every week and you invariably see people who don't pick up their spent hulls and the staff has to go around and collect them for the trash. Bad form.
I'm new to the Board of Directors there and asked one day: was there no better way to dispose of the empty hulls other than for them to end up in a landfill? I was told that they had tried several times over the years to get someone to take them for recycling. No luck. No one was interested and apparently no one had figured out how to profitably separate the plastic from the metal and do something useful with the byproducts.
Then about a month or so ago a couple of us saw, pretty much simultaneously, in the National Skeet Shooting Association (NSSA) newsletter that the National Shooting Center in Texas had begun using a company that had figured out a way to recycle the spent shells. The company is Garrison Green out of Denver, Colorado.
http://www.garrisongreenllc.com/index.html
We started reading their material and thought it was too good to be true. You sign an agreement, they send you the collection bags, and when they're full you make arrangements for them to take them away. AT NO COST TO YOU! As I said - seemed to good to be true. So we made a few phone calls to ranges using their service. Everyone spoken to was thrilled. So very soon we will begin recycling spent shotgun hulls! Oh - they'll also take empty White Flyer clay target boxes. We're excited because not only are we doing something environmentally friendly and responsible, we're most likely going to be able to cut our waste disposal costs in half. Good stuff.
Which leads me to the main point I wanted to make. I''m surprised that no one had figured out a way to recycle this kind of stuff until relatively recently - especially when hunters, sportsman, and shooter have always been environmentally conscious on the whole. At Loch Raven we are on watershed property so we are required to have quarterly lead testing performed, but we have it performed monthly in an effort to keep keenly conscious of what's happening on the property. And every 8-10 years LRSTC has a company come in with sifting equipment that scrapes down the property and removes the accumulated lead shot.
As y'all know, there's a lot of gun haters out there and everything you can do counts. So now we're thrilled to be able to add hull recycling to our environmentally friendly credentials. I'd be interested in hearing what other ranges are doing.
I'm new to the Board of Directors there and asked one day: was there no better way to dispose of the empty hulls other than for them to end up in a landfill? I was told that they had tried several times over the years to get someone to take them for recycling. No luck. No one was interested and apparently no one had figured out how to profitably separate the plastic from the metal and do something useful with the byproducts.
Then about a month or so ago a couple of us saw, pretty much simultaneously, in the National Skeet Shooting Association (NSSA) newsletter that the National Shooting Center in Texas had begun using a company that had figured out a way to recycle the spent shells. The company is Garrison Green out of Denver, Colorado.
http://www.garrisongreenllc.com/index.html
We started reading their material and thought it was too good to be true. You sign an agreement, they send you the collection bags, and when they're full you make arrangements for them to take them away. AT NO COST TO YOU! As I said - seemed to good to be true. So we made a few phone calls to ranges using their service. Everyone spoken to was thrilled. So very soon we will begin recycling spent shotgun hulls! Oh - they'll also take empty White Flyer clay target boxes. We're excited because not only are we doing something environmentally friendly and responsible, we're most likely going to be able to cut our waste disposal costs in half. Good stuff.
Which leads me to the main point I wanted to make. I''m surprised that no one had figured out a way to recycle this kind of stuff until relatively recently - especially when hunters, sportsman, and shooter have always been environmentally conscious on the whole. At Loch Raven we are on watershed property so we are required to have quarterly lead testing performed, but we have it performed monthly in an effort to keep keenly conscious of what's happening on the property. And every 8-10 years LRSTC has a company come in with sifting equipment that scrapes down the property and removes the accumulated lead shot.
As y'all know, there's a lot of gun haters out there and everything you can do counts. So now we're thrilled to be able to add hull recycling to our environmentally friendly credentials. I'd be interested in hearing what other ranges are doing.
