COMPANY RECOVERS COINS FROM TRASH

There’s a Covanta Holding Corp. incinerator outside Philadelphia that produces electricity from burning garbage. It also produces something else: stacks and stacks of blackened, sooty coins.

Over the course of a year, those nickels, dimes and quarters add up to about $360,000. That’s seven times the average income in the Philadelphia metropolitan region, and the money is piling up as Covanta waits for the U.S. Mint to resume coin purchases under an exchange program it suspended in November.

About $61.8 million of loose change is accidentally thrown away every year in the U.S., Covanta estimates. The coins get swept off restaurant tables, mixed in with scraps when people empty their pockets, and vacuumed up from carpets or sofa cushions. The money used to end up in the dump, but as trash volume increases and open space dwindles, landfill-disposal costs are up 25 percent in the past decade. That’s created an incentive for Covanta and other companies to develop ways to sift through mountains of garbage and extract steel, iron, aluminum and copper for sale to recyclers.

“It’s amazing what people throw away,” said Alex Piscitelli, who manages the plant in Chester, Pennsylvania, where Covanta developed its technique to separate change from other burnt metal.

Covanta stepped up its efforts in 2011 to recover metals from the ashes at its power plants, spending about $70 million on powerful magnets and other equipment. Over five years, it has recovered more than 2 million tons of metal that was sold to recycling companies. That generated $61 million last year, or 3.7 percent of Covanta’s revenue. In 2017, the company plans to open a central facility to sort aluminum, copper and coins captured at plants in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

However, Covanta’s coin recovery effort has been on hold for almost a year. The U.S. Mint used to buy salvaged change from almost anyone, usually melting it down to make new coins. But the government suspended all purchases in November amid suspicions of counterfeiting by some sellers. Prosecutors filed a civil forfeiture suit accusing three companies of cashing in $5.5 million in fake coins imported from China.

A federal judge in Philadelphia dismissed the case in July after the companies reached a settlement with prosecutors. The Mint, meanwhile, has declined to say whether it will resume accepting damaged coins after the order suspending the program expires Nov. 2. That’s left Covanta, which wasn’t involved in the case, stockpiling buckets of sooty nickels, dimes and quarters.

“You can’t return them to the bank,” said Steve Bossotti, Covanta’s senior vice president of metals management. “You can’t melt them down. You basically have to wait to see what the Mint does.”

To read the complete article, see:
We Toss $62 Million of Loose Change Every Year. This Company Wants Some of It (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-12/trash-piles-yield-treasure-as-sifters-seek-sooty-coins-in-ashes)

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