JellyJar said:
How many rounds of (pistol, rifle and shotgun) handloaded/reloaded ammo made each year?
A lot.
This is a wild guess.
Just using THR forum as an example, there are over 142,000 members. For simplicity of calculations, let's say 100,000 reloaded on average 5,000 rounds a year. That's 416 rounds per month or 500,000,000 rounds per year (half a billion).
Since not all reloaders/handloaders visit online forums, my guess of actual reloaders/handloads on a national level will probably be much higher. If we use 500,000 reloaders/handloaders for the nation (I think the actual number is much higher), 500,000 x 5000 come out to 2,500,000,000 (2.5 billion)!
For one million reloaders/handloaders, 5 billion reloaded rounds.
Now, if we factor in high volume/match shooters, the number goes up significantly. Let's say there are about 100 high volume/match shooters per county and they average 1000+ rounds per month. Using 50 counties per state as a rough average, we have 100 x 50 x 50 x 12,000 = over 3,000,000,000 (3 billion).
Since some reloaders/handloaders load less than 416 rounds a month, total combined round count may be around 5 to 10 billion a year. Maybe more.
If you factor in rounds that are loaded for stock piling and long-term storage, who knows?
Of course, this is only my guess so the actual numbers may vary significantly.