May have hit the mother lode.

[oley55]

Saying or doing something generous to/for your club just may possibly have the opposite effect...

Below is an article from my local shooting club/range. The volume of material salvaged from just two of the pistol ranges is quite impressive. The next time I see the company mining, I plan to approach them to see if they will sell me some bulk unprocessed material, but I fear environmental interests and/or club income could be an issue.

Lead Mining

If you were out to the range to shoot in January, you may have noticed unusual equipment on the property (like that in the lower right of the page). The last time we mined lead from our berms was about 2 years ago and with the heavy usage of the range by our members, it was time to mine the berms again. Perhaps this is one of the maintenance chores that the average shooter doesn't typically consider. The bullet goes in the berm and that's good, right?

In the early years of the club, we were much smaller and didn't have to mine the berms very often. As our membership passed 2,000 in the 1990's, we started mining the berms on a regular basis and were surprised by the 60,000 lbs. we recovered from the old 25/50 yard Bullseye line the first time we mined it.

We currently have a lead management program that complies with the Florida "Best Management Practices for Environmental Stewardship of Florida Shooting Ranges". This program gives the club certain protections under Florida statues, the main one being that as long as we periodically recycle our lead, it is simply treated as a recyclable metal and not hazardous waste.

Given the shear scope of our mining effort, we have been using a company that specializes in lead recovery from shooting ranges to recover our lead. Not only do they recycle it, but they provide written reports for documentation in our lead file and after removing the spent bullets, the dirt is treated to maintain a Ph-level that prevents possible leaching of lead into the soil. They also reface the berms and all the tractor tracks are smoothed out.

As the mining is occurring we also take this time to do maintenance on the ranges like straightening up target frames and rebuilding bulkheads. Each range has to have the target frames removed so the machines can reach the face of the berm. In the case of the 25/50-yard pistol line, those heavy 50-yard target holders have to be taken out. It's a job! Get this; the last two times this was done, 115,000 lbs. of lead was removed!
Thanks for reading. See you at the range.