Up to $68 Million in Coins Winds Up in the Trash Every Year
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Before we get into today's episode, your money briefing is exploring what you need to know to become a homeowner and sustain your home. You can get early access to our series, Buying a Home and Keeping It, on WSJ Special Access, available only for WSJ subscribers. Now on to the show. Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, April 19th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. More than $60 million in change winds up in America's landfills each year. And the coins you still have around your house? You probably don't think you have much use for them.
People don't have as much of an opportunity to spend them as they did in the past. Mobile payments and credit cards have really made it difficult to spend your coins somewhere like the bus or a laundromat or a toll booth or even a parking meter. All of those things now take credit or debit or a tap from your phone, and that leaves coins pretty useless.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Oyen Adedoyen about what to do with all those coins in your couch, on your dresser, and last season's winter coat, and in between the seats of your car. After the break.
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Waste management facilities sort tons of trash every day, and in that trash is cold, hard cash in the form of millions of dollars worth of coins. Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Oyen Adedoyen visited one and joins me now. Oyen, we talk about money every day on this show. You went right to the source. Well, sort of.
Yeah, I went to this waste management facility in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, which is just outside of New Jersey, to see their coin collection operation. They're separating coins from everyday trash. It's pretty loud in here.
So they have a separate coin collection area. There are that many coins they scoop up?
It's a huge facility, and so four acres of that land is dedicated to just extracting coins from the trash.
How much in coins are they extracting?
They extract anywhere between $500,000 to $1 million worth of coins a year.
What do they do with all the coins?
You know, once they sort them and clean them and check to make sure they're still viable, they send them to a third-party processor who counts them, gives them the money, and then distributes the actual physical coins back into the banking system through local banks.
So that one location is extracting a million dollars in coins. How much is being extracted at facilities around the country?
Well, Reworld, the waste management facility that I visited, estimates that Americans throw away up to $68 million worth of coins each year.
$68 million.
Yes, that is the high scale.
That's a GDP of a small country.
Exactly. That's a lot of cash.
Besides the trash facilities, where else are unwanted coins being collected?
People aren't just chucking their coins in the garbage. These are coins that are left in between your couch cushions. They're left at TSA checkpoints.
How much money in coins gets thrown away in the U.S. each year?
They're just kind of forgotten about, left in your car maybe.
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