Americans Throw Away Up to $68 Million in Coins a Year. Here Is Where It All Ends Up. [View all]
At a waste-management facility in Morrisville, Pa., workers load incinerated trash into industrial machinery that separates and sorts metals, then sends them to get hosed down. The reward: buckets of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.
Americans toss as much as $68 million worth of change each year, according to Reworld. The sustainable-waste processing company is on a treasure-hunt to find it. The company says that in the seven years since it started the effort, it has collected at least $10 million worth of coins.
Coins are as good as junk for many Americans. Buses, laundromats, toll booths and parking meters now take credit and debit cards and mobile payments. Using any form of physical currency has become more of an annoyance, but change is often more trouble than it is worth to carry around. The U.S. quarter had roughly the buying power in 1980 that a dollar has today.
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Because coins can be hard to spend, they circulate slowly through the economy—or don’t circulate at all. More than half of the coins in the U.S. are sitting in people’s homes, according to the Federal Reserve. Many coins are also getting left behind. At airport checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration collects hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them each year. Coins are left in couch cushions or cars, then sucked into vacuums and sent to landfills, said Dominic Rossi, Reworld’s director of finance and business support.
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People tend to bring their extra change to the bank to trade in, but it is getting harder to do even that. Capital One and PNC removed their coin-counting machines about a decade ago due to low customer use. In 2016, TD Bank pulled the plug on its coin-counting machines after an investigation found that it was giving customers less money than they were putting in. Today many people cash in their coins at Coinstar kiosks in grocery stores and gas stations. The company has said it operates over 24,000 kiosks across the country and has processed more than 800 billion coins.
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