>>52220Honestly you can do a lot to cut on price and save on the environment, there already exists plastic and nylon jacketed bullets.
Aluminum cased ammunition has *some* popularity for handgun and shotgun (doesn't work as well for rifles, due to the much higher pressures), due to low cost. Aluminum is one of those metals which is really easy to recycle and which there's genuinely good value in doing so (3/4ths of America's aluminum production is recycled), and since you can't reload aluminum cases, you could just melt them down for scrap like any other aluminum waste.
Issue with aluminum cases is that some guns just don't "like" the stuff, however, so I wonder what other routes you could go to make a lower cost case, it would have to be a metal which would allow for obturation (gas sealing), as well as a heat sink. Steel is low in cost, and if you have it annealed it can work pretty reasonably in many guns (again, many types of guns will just not like the stuff), though it can accelerate wear, and it's really not worth recycling, at least not for it's base material.
