Lifecycle assessment of a PFHE shell grenade

The environmental constraint on all activities in society increases. Today there is a growing understanding of the need to minimize the environmental impacts and the military defence can not be an exception. So far, most of the work in this field has been focused on the direct environmental impact from the energetic materials in the munition. There has been a very small amount of work on the life cycle aspects concerning military materiel. This report describes a two year project, funded by the Swedish Armed Forces, with the purpose of performing life cycle assessments of munitions. As a case study, grenades for the Swedish combat vehicle 90 were chosen. The results from this study show that the most environmental severe process is the use of the grenade in a warlike situation. It also shows that the use of metals and non renewable energy sources have a large impact on the life cycle.