LogFAQs > #984003160

adjl posted...

Pennies have a bad habit of kind of removing themselves from circulation. Retailers need to stock them to be able to give change, but when people get them, they tend to end up just accumulating in change jars and other such places because they aren't worth enough to carry them around and it takes a very long time to amass enough to justify a trip to a bank to deposit them.

Even beyond that, you have all the people who treat them like they're worthless and just toss them on the ground or in the trash. I've seen people do that and I just shake my head.

Meanwhile I'm picking up every penny I see. Because my weird OCD forces me to do it for "luck" (even though I don't actually believe in luck).

I read an article recently that said something like $70 million in change gets thrown out every year. That just seems crazy when you think about it.



adjl posted...

even if the plan is to destroy the pennies instead of trying to store them long-term in some manner of vault.

Presumably they'd be melted down and repurposed. Copper and zinc are both valuable, and there are ways to separate metals (or potentially just mix them together into brass). The biggest problem would be having to sort them by year, because different coins from different time periods have significantly different proportions. A penny minted last year is mostly just zinc with a copper coating (which you can actually see if you ever cut one in half). But most pre-1980 coins are a vast majority amount of copper.

If you could get a roughly equal number of older pennies and newer ones, you'd probably be pretty close to the proportions you'd need to smelt fairly usable brass (though you might need to add extra copper, because it's likely in any buyback you'd get way more newer coins than older ones).