More than a quarter of a century of hard work has begun to pay off as the Army begins destroying the aging chemical weapons stored at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in eastern Pueblo County. It was 1988 when local Sierra Club leaders became aware of plans to destroy the nation’s stockpile of these weapons of mass destruction, using one of the most polluting technologies available at the time – incineration.

Through the decade of the 1990s, the Sierra Club led the local effort to persuade the Pentagon to use safer, more effective methods; and we helped to found the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a national coalition of concerned citizens here and at eight other US chemical weapons storage sites.

Here in southern Colorado, we built a broad coalition that included environmentalists, labor leaders, church leaders, farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and other concerned citizens to support the safe, effective and expeditious destruction of the stockpile stored here.

In 2002, we won that battle. The Army announced that the mustard agent stockpile here would be processed using a combination of hydrolysis (reaction with water) and biotreatment (the same process used to treat sewage in communities everywhere). In the years since then, we have continued to work with the Pentagon and the community to make sure that the job gets done well. Now in the final pre-operation testing phase, on the plains east of Pueblo, near the concrete igloos where the chemical weapons are stored, there sit two units that will be used to destroy the 780,000 chemical rounds stored there.

One is a multi-billion dollar facility designed to disassemble the munitions, remove the mustard agent they contain, treat the agent with water and microorganisms, manage the limited amounts of waste generated and recycle the process water back into the system.

The other is a smaller, mobile Explosive Destruction System, a specially designed unit to process the defective rounds that cannot be managed safely in the larger facility.

In March 2015, the first weapon from the Pueblo stockpile was destroyed. That was a banner day for us, for southern Colorado, for the nation and the rest of the world. When the final round is destroyed sometime later in this decade, this planet will be a cleaner, safer, better place -- and we helped to make it happen.