Dynasafe: Making the world safer, one bomb at a time
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, contributing writer for Interesting Engineering. In this episode, we are joined by Charlie Diggs, CEO of Dynasafe, to explore the hidden dangers of unexploded ordnance and the groundbreaking technologies his team uses to make the world a safer place. We discuss the global impact of old munitions, the environmental challenges of underwater bombs, and how Dynasafe is leading the charge in innovative explosive disposal solutions.

Before getting into today's episode, here's something to elevate your 2025. Level up your knowledge with IE Plus. Subscribe today to access exclusive premium articles enriched with expert insights and enjoy members-only technical newsletters designed to keep you ahead in technology and science. Subscribe now. Now let's continue with today's episode. Charlie, thanks for joining us. How are you today? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. For our audience's benefit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please?

Sure. My name's Charlie Diggs. I'm the CEO of Dynasafe. I've been in the demilitarization business ever since I left the U.S. Navy as a contractor to the U.S. and then eventually discovered this amazing company called Dynasafe that we actually purchased equipment from to destroy weapons for the United States.

And then a few years later, I joined their team. And then I became the managing director of their U.S. division. They wanted to start a U.S. company. About five years later, I became the global CEO of that company. And then a few years later, I decided to

invest where my passion was, and I purchased the company from the carbon dioxide group we owned. And so this is all I've ever done is destroy weapons and protect people from explosive hazards.

And that's where my passion is, and that's why I was attracted to Dynastate and love what we do. Great. You look too young to have done so much stuff. That's an interesting story. On to our first question then. So how significant is the issue of unexploded ordnance around the world, and can you share any statistics or examples, if possible?

Yeah, I mean, it's still very, very significant. If you look globally, the...

The amount of incidents is pretty flat across the last 20 years of how many incidents has happened. But the severity of those incidents and how many casualties you have has significantly decreased. And that's because of companies like ours that have been able to put in products to mitigate those hazards. But it's still significant. I mean, if you look at...

take the U.S. bomb data center. You know, they've reported over 320 bombings in the U.S.,

Out of that, I mean, over 6,000 suspicious packages, over 3,200 threats. The amount of threats are actually increasing worldwide. And then if you look at a global scale, I mean, there was over 640 incidences in the world. And out of those, unfortunately, there's approximately 1,500 casualties. So this is still...

very, very relative and needs to be addressed. Okay. So you deal more with sort of terrorist-related stuff or old military ordnance or a mixture of the two? Yeah. So we really have three different kind of sectors of our company or business units. One is what we call protection services or protection

And that is containment vessels. That's what you would call a bomb chamber, right? We call it protection systems. And that is, you know, if you've ever watched a movie and you've seen the SWAT team come in with the robot and they're putting it in the white pill and, you know, clearing the area, that white pill, that's what we do. So we don't build the robots. We don't do any of that. We take care of the containment.

vessels. And, you know, you have everything down from a very small handheld where two men can carry it type of containment chambers all the way up to very large chambers that can hold, you know, tens of kilos of

of a TNT equivalent of explosives up to, we've, we've made some really large custom chambers in our time, but, but I mean, that's, that's one sector of the business and, you know, the target audience there, that's going to be your airports, your, your local police, your, um, bomb squads, uh, all over the world. And, you know, that's, that's a very international product. And, um,

And then the second kind of, you know, area of our business is demilitarization. So what that is, is, you know, getting rid of obsolete weapons that governments have. It's usually, that's a governmental, you know, we're going to the national level of the governments to sell those type of weapons.

And there we're building an entire plant. We're going from the input conveyors all the way to the detonation chambers and all the way through the off-gash treatment system and then out the stack. And we take care of the entire plant.

And our engineers design that, we build it, we deliver it to the site, we train our clients, and then either we turn it over or operate ourselves. And our third business unit is really just taking care of those other two, right? It's selling wear and spare parts, doing training, providing engineering support, you know,

Of course, with each generation, you learn more and you can do retrofits to old chair. But that third business unit is really just supporting those protection and those demilitarization equipment that's already in the field in operation. So that's kind of the outlook of Dynasafe. Okay, okay. So you mentioned a number of instances of rising, did you say?

The number of incidents is relatively staying flat. The good news is the casualties per incident is decreasing, which is a testament to companies like ours. Fantastic. Great. Excellent. That's good to know. Yeah.

Fantastic. On to the next question. Well, you've kind of answered this really, but we're getting a bit more nitty-gritty here then. So can you explain what you actually do with Dynasty and the technology to address problems such as unexploded bombs or ordnance? Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, as I said, the containment side of our business is we design and engineer chambers, and those chambers are...

Very unique in the way that they can contain a lot of explosives at a time. Several of them can actually take repeatable detonations, some of them up to 10 times, depending on the attenuity equivalent. They actually have a very unique locking ring that you can...

If you can imagine, I always say it like this, a pressure cooker on the stove, whatever it unlocks. Okay, if you think of it like that, it's a little more complicated, but if you think of it like that, it unlocks and then it actually can spin up to 270 degrees. So that way the first responder, the police officer, the OD tech, the sergeant, whatever, can actually utilize the robot and put the suspicious package in the chamber onto a tray. And one of the hardest things

for a first responder is to get that trailer backed up to where it needs to be, operate the robot, because it never lines up in a wide open parking lot with all the space you could ever want. It's always a bad situation when somebody tucks a suspicious item, they put it in a precarious situation. So that's why we design it so that way it makes it as easy for those first responders as possible.

And that way they can set it on there. Then it will rotate back, actually close together. And then that lock, you're going to lock. And at that point, you're safe. And you can take that munition or that package, drive it off, drive it to a rank, get away from the people. Everybody's going to be safe. If it goes off in there, fine.

It's okay. But the idea is that you would take it off to a range. Your EOD guys would go in. They would open it up. Then they could do their forensics and try to figure out where this came from and then detonate it or dismantle it in a safe manner according to their local procedures. So we're trying to keep the people safe. Sorry, go ahead.

On our demilitarization side, that's quite different. We're usually dealing with two different scenarios here. It's usually stockpiled obsolete munitions that are very pristine and attractive. And governments usually do a very good job of keeping these safe and secure in their own military base. And you're just, you know, the weapon system is no longer valid or they're just, you know, deteriorating. They're just old.

And we've done a lot of chemical and conventional weapons. My specialty was chemical weapons before I joined Dynasafe. And then you're just, you know, you're putting those in the input conveyor. That input conveyor is feeding them to an armored, electrically heated chamber. You'll heat it up to the point of detonation or deflagration.

meaning it'll either explode, which is rare, or like crack open and then burn out, which is the normal. And then, you know, those off, now you got to take care of those gases inside of there that come off. And that will go, you know, through our off-gash treatment system. We designed that too. And it will go all the way through our off-gash treatment system and they'll come out the stack. And we monitor that and make sure everything's within the

Whichever regulation, whether it be EPA or EU or wherever we are, whatever air regulation we have to follow, we'll make sure it's that. And that air that's coming out of the stack is cleaner than the air you're breathing right now in your room. I mean, it's that clean. So that's kind of what we do on our demilitarization side. Okay. So with the containment capsules.

well, is it just depending on the size of the actual explosive that can fit in it or is it rated up to a certain... Right. It rated up to a certain amount that it could take. And it also depends on what type of debris they put in with it. One of the

One of the most deadly, unfortunately, is a pipe bomb. That's going to create a lot of shrapnel. But our chambers come with a... We can put a fragment liner in there. So that way it catches those fragments and that becomes the wearable piece of the chamber. So you could take that out

And then, you know, and then put a new one in. So that way your chamber's still intact, depending on the limitation. But we have a very high safety factor. So if we say it can hold 10, you know, I mean, that's all we would sell it for. But obviously we have a lot of, you know, margin of error in our calculations. And then we test every single chamber that leaves our facility on our Q and X series is tested. So we always detonate the first one.

round in there. And so we have a high degree of competence in our quality and our prompt. I see. I'm just trying to think because you're in a situation there's a bomb there. Who is putting the bomb in the capsule? The first responders or your team called in? No, no, no. It'd be the first responders. Yeah, so if I put myself in their situation, like I don't know what kind of bomb this is. Do I know what capsule to put it in? Does that make any sense or...

Yeah, I mean, but you can make some assumptions, right? The products we sell are depending on the location. So you know how much you can fit in a backpack, right? You're only going to be able to fit, you know, at tops, 10 kilos, you know, in a backpack. Right.

If it's a purse. Now, look, if it's a car bomb, there's nothing we can do about that. There's other mechanisms. That's not something that happens. Our products are geared towards that. If you're selling to an airport, if you're pre-security, you may have a different chamber

than if you're post-security. Because you've got to assume, okay, post-security, you wouldn't have got a large golf bag through because you couldn't have got that through the checked bag. You could only get the checked bag through the TSA or whatever security you're going through. So therefore, behind those security checkpoints, you don't need something that large. So we sell a product called like a Q5 or an airport chamber that has...

has a much lower capacity, but it's a lot cheaper and it's more mobile and it could fit through a standard size door, which is more important. So we have to work with the different people and say, okay, where do you think your threat could be?

And then we can kind of gauge, okay, it's probably unlikely you're ever going to get, you know, a threat this large. Mobility is more important for you. Being able to climb stairs are more important to you. You know, speed, whatever that is. Or if you're just, you know, a general police department out in the middle of town, well, you're probably going to need a larger one that you can drag behind a truck or a trailer because you don't know what you're going to come into. But in the end...

If in doubt, throw it in the chamber. You may break the chamber, but you're going to protect the people and we would rather you be out the chamber than the people. It's a bit of a hypothetical question, but as long as I've been alive, there's been talk of dirty bombs, portable nuclear warheads, right? In theory, a portable nuclear bomb

So we have options for that. We could put lead shielding, you know, we can put items on there. Of course, those are all options. Of course, that, you know, increases cost, increases weight. But in those situations, yes, we do have solutions for that in case that is a threat in your area. Yeah. Good God. Okay. I wish I hadn't asked. Yeah.

Again, right, it's kind of off-topic, because it doesn't sound like you deal with old landmines or unexploded bombs actually out in the field. Yeah, I actually didn't finish my thought a minute ago. I should have. But I was saying that there's two different types of demilitarization. One was the pristine weapons. The other side of that, I should have said, was...

We also deal with, you know, weapons that are, like, dug out of the ground, out of ranges that are in the water, that are in lakes, that are in the ocean. You know, that's a whole not... Now, we don't go and recover those munitions. That's not something that Dynastiff does, but there's plenty of amazing companies that do that. And, you know, then that's...

we use the same products, but the methodology is different. And a lot of times the off-gash treatment system is different, but handle that. Because the danger there is, what is it? Now we have to, it doesn't have good records. It's covered in mud or rust or whatever. So we have to be extremely careful and protect those operators, the ones that are destroying that, and make sure we have systems in place. But the EOD community is

is really good at identifying weapons. And there's a lot of really smart people that can do that. But yeah, we do both sides of that. So a lot of times what we get is pretty nasty. So you're global, right? So you've got operations in Europe, UK. Yeah. So our main offices are in Sweden. We're a Swedish company. Our main office is Sweden. And that's where we build all of our chambers and offices.

our demilitarization destruction side. In Germany, we have an office, and that's where all of our engineers design the off-gash treatment system side of things. And then in the U.S., we have an office, and we're just now starting to build some of our bomb chambers here for the U.S. side, but that's relatively new.

The U.S. is more of a corporate and sales office until now. And now we're building our first workshop and exploring doing some manufacturing here in the U.S. But we have a lot of U.S. contracts for demilitarization. Because there was a push worldwide and a treaty to get rid of all chemical weapons. And the U.S. was a bit behind, but now they have completed that mission. And we were a big part in doing that. Excellent. So is there any call at all for...

sort of chambers for unexploded ordnance found randomly in Europe from the wars, World War I, World War II, that's all.

I'm sorry, can you repeat that? Do you get much cooler at any, say there's some groundwork somewhere in Europe, they're building a new car park or something, and they dig up an old bomb or something like that. Could your chambers use that? Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what we're here for. If you're doing construction in London and you recover an old munition, yeah, they can put them inside of our chambers.

And like I said, then they can transport it out to a safe place. I mean, we have plants, we have over 40 demilitarization plants all over the world. I think we're approaching 500 chambers. So we've been around 33 years. So, you know, we, we, we're in, I think we're in 170 countries. So as far as our customers. So,

usually we have ability to be able to assist them. But yeah, that would be the idea. If you have a construction crew that uncovers some hand grenades or a mortar round or something, yeah, you call the police. The police would use our unit and they would come out and tuck that away and then take it to a range and let the experts deal with it. Excellent. On that subject then, I

How do unexploded ordnance and remnants affect ecosystems and biodiversity in affected areas? Yeah, I think, you know, there's plenty of studies about this. I'll highlight, you know, one of the most recent ones that's really received a push, and that's the underwater munitions. You know, obviously nobody wants to live next to a...

you know, unexploded ordnance or range or something. But, but governments do a pretty, pretty good job about, you know, maintaining those, keeping the safety distances and taking care of the people. So,

Um, you know, but one area, you know, long time ago, it was very commonplace to, to just load munitions, chemical and conventional on a ship and take it out to sea and either sink the ship with the munitions in it or just throw them overboard, you know, and, uh, and we use the ocean as a, as a, as a garbage dump. And, uh, and so, you know, now we're paying the price for that. We're, uh, uh, and, and everywhere, but, you know, in, in,

In particular, one of the worst areas right now is the Baltic Sea. I say that. It's worst to best. The Baltic region really seems to be focused on cleaning that up, and there's a lot of effort being put into cleaning that up, and we're happy to see that. It hasn't actually started the cleaning process, but there's a lot of political movement in that direction and activists and people getting on board with that. But yeah, I mean, it's affecting the fishing industry. It's washing up on shores.

it's affecting the tourism industry in certain areas where they can't use, uh,

There are certain areas there that every morning the EOD guys have to walk the beach and, you know, pick up any munitions. But there's a lot of studies. Academia has done in the area. They've done a great job looking at it and, you know, seeing how long we have until munitions start leaking. Some of them are already leaking because obviously in those conditions, the saltwater, it's, you know,

deteriorating the metal and then at some point the chemical weapons or even the TNT are going to leak into the water and that's going to affect your ecosystem. And there really just hasn't been a push to get rid of them until recent years. So we're happy to see that push. Something I've always wondered about is torpedoes because they make quite a lot of light. So you've got to go somewhere.

They all have small pictures of them coming off on beaches and whatnot. Obviously, that's a less common problem, but fishing industry conceivably could put it up in the nets and cause all sorts of problems. Yeah, it's not uncommon for... Now, torpedoes are so large that it's harder, but it's not uncommon for

you know, fishermen to pull up munitions. I mean, we, we, we hear about that all the time. Um, it's, it's better whenever the countries have a, a good protocol in place and, and, and make that easier because, uh, uh, then they'll actually turn it in and not just throw it back over cause I won't deal with it. Um, and, um, but you know, you,

torpedoes are heavy enough usually you're not going to be washing up you know the currents will bring the smaller stuff and throw it on the beach but we have the same thing and especially heavily bombed areas of world one and war two um

you know, farmers will be plowing the fields and they're still pulling up munitions. In one country we work in a lot, they actually put them in these light poles that have holes in them. And as they till up the earth and they find one, they'll just run and stick it in the light pole. And then the EOD guys come around the truck and pick them up once a week or so, you know, and it's become that commonplace.

Because that area of the world was so heavily bombed in World War I. And you're still collecting. And then what they do is they take it to a facility and then they clean it and identify it and they actually destroy it in one of our chambers. So it's still a problem and it's going to be for a long time. Yeah, especially landmines.

It's going to be a legacy problem in places like Ukraine, presumably. Yeah, it's the cost of war that you don't think about. And, you know, the sad part is after any war, not just Ukraine, but any war, after the military gets done fighting and we lose life on the military side,

every munition has a dud rate. It can be very, very low, but when you start sending hundreds of thousands of munitions, there's going to be some live ones. And what's going to happen, right? Normally, a lot of them take a

you know, cluster munition or grenade that looks like a ball, right? Uh, so, you know, little boys, little girls are going to go out there and throw it around and, uh, and you know, what I'm going to be live. And, and it's, it's, it's very unfortunate. And now we have a lot of great NGOs and, and, and clearance people that will rush in and try to prevent that from happening. Uh, it's not something Dynasafe does, but there are a lot of, uh, a lot of organizations that try to mitigate that as fast as possible. But, uh,

There is always a remit of war and, you know, we'll be there decades cleaning up after that. Absolutely. Very sad. You've kind of answered this one, but I'll ask anyway. What makes Dynasafe's approach to disposing of unexploded ordnance unique compared to traditional methods? Yeah, I think, you know, of course I'm biased because, you know, I'll argue a company, but we're

We're one of the few military or defense contractors that this is all we do. We don't make weapons. We just destroy weapons. And that's what we focus on. And we've been asked to partner with people and get into that business. And that's not our legacy. That's not what we want to do.

we're not interested in that. We're interested in making the world a safer and cleaner place by mitigating explosive hazards. And that's what we care about. So when you focus on that, you can be very passionate about that. And I think it allows us to attract very, very good people, very good engineers, very good technicians, very good, you know, non-engineering positions because they're, you know,

you can really get behind our calls and what we do. And I think you're, you're able to attract those people. So, you know, our product, you know, we believe we have the best product in the industry, of course. Uh, I think we've proven that, uh, we get sole sourced a lot. We're, uh, we're,

you know we're definitely the premier product but the reason we are is because we are people and and we can attract those people because uh you know i like to say you know what we do is good and we're good at what we do you know so that's fair enough when you said that i was thinking of the film 300 how many do you have well i don't have i don't have the abs for that so anyway um

So what have you found are the biggest challenges Dynasafe has faced deploying its solutions in conflict zones, if you've done so, or heavily contaminated areas? Yeah, we don't deploy too much while a conflict is happening. That's something, usually it's afterwards. And so that's not too relevant, you know,

to what we do. Normally, it's over and the area clearance guys have already gone in there and cleaned everything up and then we come in and destroy everything. It doesn't mean we're not without risk, but we're not actively in zones like that. Yeah. Any plans to in the future? I presume not. No, I mean, we, you know, of course we will support...

you know, wherever it makes sense and wherever we can ensure the safety of our employees. Um, if, you know, if asked, of course we would try to train, you know, soldiers or, or, uh, whoever was going in. Um, but we wouldn't put our employees in that, you know, in that type of environment. No. Um,

Not without a, you know, there had to be a tremendous reason to do that. And I can't imagine us doing that. That's fair enough. Fair enough. Fair answer. Have you been approached at all by, I don't know, so the US Army for some kind of

battlefield version of your containment vessels at all? Yeah, of course. We have very mobile units and we've been approached by that, not just US, just different general ideas. And of course, there's been concepts of several models back, being able to transport munitions.

And, you know, there's some players in the world, you know, name any of them, but we know that if we ever got an opportunity to go in and destroy those weapons, then it would be good for the world. And we would, of course, assist in the best way we could by training their military personnel. But we haven't really done much of that. We've done some concept training.

uh stuff with uh different countries especially you know countries bordering other countries that maybe you would like to get rid of the weapons there uh especially you know chemical warfare and and that that type of weaponry we've but you know our bread and butter is is is you know stable areas and and you know having to transport it back that's fair enough um yeah

So looking ahead then, are there any new exciting technologies or methods that Dynasafe is developing to improve ordnance detection and or disposal? Yeah, I mean, we're doing some really cool things on our containment vessels. We're changing some of our designs and getting those with higher NEW net explosive weight limits and, you know,

Those are neat areas. On the demilitarization side, we're really kind of focusing, we're coming out of the chemical weapon era into the conventional era.

So we're doing a lot of, as a company, standardization and getting our products standardized and interchangeable with different areas. For instance, our off-gash treatment systems, we're building those on modules now. And so you can just plug and kind of play. A little more complicated than that, but imagine whatever your need is, you can plug and play what you need. And the idea is to get the cost down so that way more people can afford our

our services, you know, because unfortunately they're, um,

some places that can't afford our services that really need them. And so we're trying to, you know, get things more mobile. That's a system we have going now and it has tremendous success. And so we're trying to use that as a model because it would be a neat concept to like if, you know, the United Nations or somebody, they don't currently, but if they own one of these and could move it around to different locations,

locations that needed help but maybe couldn't afford services like a company like ours. That would be a tremendous asset to the world, we think. So we're doing some R&D. We're doing some stuff in single-use disposable stuff, our R&D department is. So a soldier is out in the field and discovers a round hook

chemical weapon round, how can they take out that one individual round so that way it can't be used as an IED later or something like that. So we've got a great R&D department and they're constantly coming up with really cool ideas of stuff for the future. Absolutely. Something that would be really cool. Say soldiers in a trench, grenade comes in, some kind of thing, they stick on it to contain the blast. Yeah.

That would be really cool. Have you got any plans for developing your own robots at all? No. Not at the time. That market, there's a lot of people that do that really well. There's no point in trying to compete with people that are already doing something really well. If we saw...

If we saw a need, of course, we'd be willing to invest in that. But right now, we let the robot people do that and we'll stick to what we do best. So your deconditioning plants, presumably they're staffed or are they more or less automated? So they're staffed to a certain level, but it's a high level of automation. So worker safety is so important to us that...

We have most of ours. You just put it in a cardboard box on the input conveyor and then you walk away. You load up a line of, you know, say 12, 15 boxes, whatever the mean case is. And then you would go to a control room that's, you know, several hundred meters away or, and then you would, you would operate remotely. So we have a high degree of automation, automation,

We have redundancy after redundancy after redundancy in place in case something happens. We have, you know, safety protocols throughout the plant in our automation, but then also, you know, fail safes that are mechanical in case you were to lose all power.

So, but, you know, typically there's not a lot of human interaction that's needed. And we've even gotten to where some of our systems were using robots to load the line.

And we've even experimented a little bit with using like the, the ground or robots to bring them in. But ultimately a person has to put them somewhere, right. You know? Uh, so, you know, we're, we're expanding what we can do with automation. Um, and that's great for, uh,

sophisticated clients that can afford that. But again, we also have to think about how do we make our equipment accessible to everyone, not just the larger governments. So that way we can be able to destroy weapons to everyone that needs it. So we have to kind of go two different directions when we're thinking about what we're developing. We have to think, what's the highest degree of

and everything, but also what's achievable so that way everyone can enjoy our products. Okay. With regards to waste and at the end of the cycle, you mentioned the air is very clean, comes out the stack. What other waste materials are produced then and are they safe for disposal? How do you dispose of them? Absolutely. So, you know, I'll

I'll brag. Our off-gash treatment system is, to my knowledge, somebody may correct me on this podcast, but to my knowledge, we're the only off-gash treatment system in the world that's wastewater-free.

Our engineers have designed a completely wastewater-free off-gash treatment system, and I haven't seen one of those before or heard of one. And so all you're going to have, you're going to have the scrap metal that comes out from your munitions, and that is going to be to a cleanliness level that you can just send it to a local recycler. You can go to a smelter or a local recycler. So you'll get a little bit of money for that. And then you're going to have some salts.

That's going to come out of, you know, as your water is evaporating in the off-gash treatment system. And then we do have a back house in most of our systems. So therefore, you're going to have a, you know, some amount of pre-coat sodium bicarbonate. But most all of us are going to be non-haz. So it's very little. I mean, you're talking a couple of 55-gallon drums per year.

a week. And, of course, your metal, but your metal is going to be, you know, a small profit margin for you, you know, as an operating. Okie dokie. So with the salts, can they be used for anything else or do they have to just be disposed of? Can they get raw material for something? We...

You know, they probably could. There's so few, though, I mean, that we just usually ship it off to an off-site disposal, you know, system. If there was a large amount, we would try to figure out something, but it's such a small amount. That's fair enough. I was curious. Okay, so last question then.

What role does public awareness play in addressing the dangers of unexploded ordnance and how can individuals and communities contribute to said solutions? Yeah, I think, you know, that's a good question. So going back to the underwater munitions, okay. The only reason that's really getting attention is because people are demanding attention, right? So, you know, you have this problem. We know it's a problem.

We know that munitions being underwater and leaking is bad. I think everybody can agree that's a bad thing. But there's really very little commercial reason

to clean that up. Okay. The government's put it there, you know, at some point, but there is, you know, offshore wind farms and things that make sure that put a little bit of pressure, but not enough. I mean, usually they're just looking for clean place to put their items. They don't want to go and clean it up. Why would they? There's no commercial reason for that.

So it has to be a government that takes the decision or a consortium of governments that take a decision that say, okay, we're going to do this. And NGOs can help with that. Nonprofits can really be in assist of that. But the people telling their local politicians, this is something that we're not going to tolerate. Of course, economic factors help a herd depending on how you look at it.

As economic factors are hurting the area, then of course the attention will come to that. But there's another. I'll take... A common way to destroy munitions in a lot of countries is...

including sophisticated countries, is just to pile them up in a field and burn them. It's called open burn, open detonation. That is a very common way. I think we can all agree that piling up munitions in a field and burning it is probably bad. That's not a good solution.

Um, but until the local community around those areas say, look, we're not going to tolerate that. We're, you know, we're not going to have that going into our air. We're not going to have the, the contamination to our soul afterwards or getting into our water or whatever. We're not gonna, we're not gonna put up with that. I mean, then, you know, that creates political pressure, which then, you know, causes, uh,

attention in that area and causes budgets to be set aside in order to get a system kind of like ours, which that won't happen. So those are areas that you have to... Local people can get involved, NGOs can get involved and really help out and put the pressure there that's needed because there's not going to be a... We do some commercial stuff, but that

there's not going to be a lot of commercial pressure there. Yeah, sounds about right, yeah. I mean, you kind of scared me a bit, so don't do that with chemical weapons, I hope. Pine them up in a field and just burn them. No, no, no, not chemical weapons. Sorry, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about conventional... Yeah, that's all right. No, not chemical. They wouldn't do that. I mean, there are chemical weapons that have been dumped in the ocean, but that was...

I mean, that was so long ago where they were just, you know, they thought of the ocean much different than we think of it now. They don't think about the ecosystem like we think about nowadays.

Yeah. It's one how much damage that has done though over the years. There's plenty of studies that show and there's some really smart people have done those calculations and it's not good, but you can imagine how costly that is to correct. I mean, it's not like going to land, but hey, technology is there. I mean, we have

We have UAVs, we have crawlers, we have all these things now. And that's nothing Dynasafe does. That's what other companies do. But I mean, all these companies have these great tools they can go and get on. And if they can get them to the surface, then Dynasafe can take care of them. So it's just like a consortium of countries need to come together to address some of these problems. You know, a consortium of countries

will come together and resolve this problem. A bit of a random question, but is this under a certain depth where it's not really a problem? Like a bomb falls in the middle of the Mariana Trench. It's not really going to be a problem long term? Or is that the stupid question? I don't know. I'm not a scientist, but...

You know, I guess, obviously, if we were going to be deciding what to go after first, it wouldn't be that area. It would be the more shallow waters and the more areas where people are going to be. I'll put it this way. We have 100 years worth of work in those areas before we get to the others. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and the munitions are pretty long gone by then, aren't they? The Deep Oceans, they'd have... Those would probably not be on the top priority list. Yeah, that's fair enough. Okay, that is the end of my questions. Is there anything else you'd like to mention that you think feels important that we haven't touched on? No, I appreciate the opportunity to come on and speak with you.

Our pleasure. That's been very, very interesting. With that then, thank you, Charlie. That was great. Good. Thank you. Also, don't forget to subscribe to IE Plus for premium insights and exclusive content.