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Turn Over Your Piggybanks. Now.

Phil Gutis: Director of Communications, New York City; Blog | About; Posted May 2, 2008 in Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment

No, this is not a plea for NRDC membership (although we wouldn't object, of course, if you wanted to wander over to the donation forms and make a contribution!) Instead, I'm writing with the fascinating observation in this week's Business Week magazine that we can turn our piggybanks green by no longer hoarding all those unspent coins.

Apparently there are some 150 billion coins stashed in homes around the country. That equals $10 billion dollars, or, according to Business Week, $90 per household.

And because we are squirreling away our coins, the US Mint needs to keep making new ones. And that involves copper mining and refining and huge amounts of power and water. Who knew.

Truth is that I hate carrying change. The minute I get home, I dump whatever I have in an old fare collection box I snagged years ago from the New York City MTA. When they were converting bus fare boxes to digital, some smart soul at the MTA decided to sell the old boxes and I was lucky enough to stumble on the sale. Ever since, I've dutifully dragged it from apartment to house and house to house as we've relocated several times. And each time it gets heavier and heavier from the accumulated weight of all those coins.

So I guess I'll be going to the bank soon to turn in my coins. And who knows, I may just make an extra contribution to NRDC with the proceeds. Its budget season here and maybe I can wrangle a few extra dollars for the communications department if I put a bit extra bit in the coffers.

Tags:: mining, simplesteps

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Comments

Marc R. — May 3 2008 12:03 PM

It would be smart for the Treasury Department to have a "Bring out your pennies" campaign with the goal of exchanging as many pennies and other coins for paper money as possible. Their collection centers would be equipped with counting machines that could rapidly total up the value of a large quantities of pennies. It would be a win for almost everyone. The Treasury Dept would have a massive new collection of pennies to circulate (or, in the case of pre-1982 coins, to melt down for the copper), thus reducing the need to spend money making new coins. The public would get some value for their pennies -- instead of sitting in jars, the pennies would be converted into more easily spent (or saved) dollar bills. Our natural world would see less mining of copper and zinc. (Nickels might also be worth recovering because they cost about 10 cents to make, as they are mostly copper.)

About a month ago The New Yorker had an interesting article about the penny. The main reason for its continued existence: the power of the zinc lobby. Here's a bit of the beginning:

A penny minted before 1982 is ninety-five per cent copper—which, at recent prices, is approximately two and a half cents’ worth. Luhrman, who had previously owned a company that refined gold and silver, devised a method of rapidly separating pre-1982 pennies from more recent ones, which are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc, a less valuable commodity. His new company, Jackson Metals, bought truckloads of pennies from the Federal Reserve, turned the copper ones into ingots, and returned the zinc ones to circulation in cities where pennies were scarce. “Doing that prevented the U.S. Mint from having to make more pennies,” Luhrman told me recently. “Isn’t that neat?” The Mint didn’t think so; it issued a rule prohibiting the melting or exportation of one-cent and five-cent coins.
...
Luhrman’s experience highlights a growing conundrum for the Mint and for U.S. taxpayers. Primarily because zinc, too, has soared in value, producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents. Since the Mint currently manufactures more than seven billion pennies a year and “sells” them to the Federal Reserve at their face value, the Treasury incurs an annual penny deficit of about fifty million dollars—a condition known in the coin world as “negative seigniorage.” The fact that the Mint loses money on penny production annoys some people, because one-cent coins no longer have much economic utility. More than a few people, upon finding pennies in their pockets at the end of the day, simply throw them away, and many don’t bother to pick them up anymore when they see them lying on the ground. (Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.)

John Archer — May 6 2008 04:30 AM

Nonsense. The problem isn't your piggybank. It's deficit-spending a fiat currency via unlimited fractional reserve banking. What are you thinking?

Tell the Fed to stop driving inflation. Tell the Fed to stop minting unconstitutional "legal tender".

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