As any experienced scrapper could tell you, knowing your scrap metal – and knowing what common, every day items contain each type of metal – is fundamental in making the most out of your time. Ensuring your man hours, and man power, is spent breaking down and collecting those items that yield the most valuable materials is key. No smart scrapper spends two hours hammering away at a steel block to try and dig out a pound of zinc. But did you know, some very valuable upgrades might be sitting in your pocket right now?
Whenever you buy something in cash, most likely you wind up with a few coins back in change. These little hunks of metal find their ways into our couches, between our car seats, just about everywhere other than into the bank. What I bet you didn’t know, however, is that although these bits of change do have a face cash value – they’re actually worth even more money in scrap!
Now before you go getting any crazy ideas, it is in fact illegal to deface American currency – change included. So while the value is there in scrap, it most likely isn’t worth the up to five years in the slammer melting them down can earn you.
In actuality, most change is worth up to double it’s face value in scrap. The tiny chunk of metal that a penny is made from is worth more than twice the value printed on the face of it. We all consider the tiny chunks with Lincoln’s face on them to be valued at one penny – after all, it says it right there on the coin! However, the value of the material in some older pennies is actually worth more than two cents. The same goes for nickels – they’re made from a blend of copper and, well, nickel – which is worth about seven cents per coin.
Some people are actually willing to buy your coins for more than they are worth. Specifically, pennies minted before 1982 are of interest, as they are made of copper (as opposed to modern pennies, which are made of zinc) and we all know about the rising value of copper.
A rising trend in some financial analysts is hoarding of coins. The reason being some people believe the time will come soon when the US Treasury doesn’t believe it’s worth it to mint pennies and nickels anymore, and therefore will no longer be illegal to melt them down.
So whether you decide to begin stashing your pennies or not, as a member of the scrap community it’s very interesting to know the little pieces of “scrap” in our pockets have definite upgrade value!
The blog post above was written by Andrew Cardinali of Basic Metals, Inc. located outside of Detroit.
The above post, comments, opinions, etc. do not in anyway reflect iScrap App‘s suggestions or position on the topic discussed.
