PREVENTION IS THE BEST DEFENSE
Identifying potential risks from environmental regulations and their impact on the supply chain—early, and more easily— to achieve both near- and long-term risk mitigation. Meaning reduced supply chain issues and less harmful chemicals pollut- ing the environment.
Te U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center (DEVCOM AC) Life Cycle Readiness Branch is developing the TRND database tool in support of the U.S. Army Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition’s (JPEO A&A) Assured Munitions effort.
Te application of TRND is more simplistic than its acronym, which stands for the first four datasets used with the tool:
T – Toxic Substances Control Act.
R – Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH).
N – National Aerospace Standards. D – Department of Defense Emergent Chemicals.
“Tis is a powerful resource that can be used to quickly identify where and how emerging chemicals of regulatory concern are present in JPEO A&A end items and or supply chain,” said Brian Hubbard, JPEO A&A’s Environmental, Safety and Occupational Health (ESOH) officer. “Te tool can be used by stakeholders supporting materiel developers and project management offices to identify how changing laws, regulations and policies could impact the ability to field armaments and ammunition items.”
According to Hubbard, the intent of TRND is to serve as a solution, where the TRND team can rapidly identify the environmental regulatory risks of a chemical or material, commu- nicate impacts to acquisition stakeholders across their chain of command and, if necessary, begin research into [less hazardous material] substitution or replacements that still achieve perfor- mance requirements and enable Soldier readiness.
THE LATEST TRND To grasp the necessity for TRND, it’s important to comprehend the impact that global environmental regulations have on DOD operations. Tings like insufficient material supply; logistical complications; schedule delays; changes to hazard management; demilitarization; manufacturing; and raw material mining may collectively hinder task execution, raise costs, affect performance
18 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2024
and necessitate adaptations requiring effective navigation to maintain operational efficiency and readiness.
Te TRND tool is capable of monitoring environmental regu- latory agencies and their watch lists containing emerging environmentally concerning chemicals and can be used to steer research in a direction to prevent some of these challenges going forward.
It also simplifies the task for engineers by eliminating the need to manually search for the presence of listed chemicals in the muni- tions supply chains. Before TRND, engineers had to extract data from multiple sources to determine whether the chemical compo- nents in their catalog items were on some of the regulatory lists.
“I thought, there’s a much better way to do this,” said Veron- ica Copp, environmental program specialist in the Life Cycle Readiness Branch at the Armaments Center, who developed the TRND worksheet tool. Copp said what started out as a phone call from Hubbard about the current process, sparked the devel- opment of a greatly needed tool that cross walks 8,379 catalog end items, subcomponents and chemicals in the JPEO A&A port- folio against multiple regulatory requirement databases like the DOD watch list, industry standards, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations and the 27-member European Union. “It was like seeing a niche need, and then responding to that with a 20-year-old technology niche.”
TRND streamlines the process into a single database tool that analyzes catalog items, breaks them down into their chemical components and compares them against the regulatory lists. “We look to see how those are regulated right now and how we think that they will be regulated in the future,” she said.
Te next iterative step, she said, will be to expand the database to include chemical synthetization route alternatives, which will map end items down to a manufacturing level. Tis can be used to add functionality of health and safety and byproducts in the manufacturing process and provide a more comprehensive look at the supply chain.
According to Copp, enhanced search criteria, chemical mapping integration, weapon system detail and user interface can be further developed in a more refined product to close identi- fied gaps in data reporting. As well as improvements for a more user-friendly report interface and integration of additional data sources.
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