What Happens to Your Loose Change?
Vocab level: B2
You're not logged in yet, your progress will not be saved!
Login now
or
Create an account
Loading...
Loading...
Ever wonder what happens to all that change you've lost over the years?
Americans throw away almost 70 million dollars worth of change every year.
And most of it ends up in the trash.
And lots of that trash ends up here at Reworld Medals outside Philadelphia.
As amazing as it is, there is coin in these piles.
Hiding in those heaps of metal waste are tens of thousands of dollars worth of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.
So these coins, we have to assume, are just getting lost in your couch cushions, or your homes, or your businesses,
or from the vacuums at car washes.
Using special machines, they run a massive coin recovery program that finds, sifts, and cleans.
We've already separated the coins, and we've washed them,
and now we're at the drying stage.
You could be looking at a couple of hundred in coins sitting on this table right now.
Eventually, all that change, now cleaned, is recirculated back into the economy.
We will separate them by their denominations.
About 50,000 lbs a year.
Lots of coins are too damaged to be saved.
For every good coin, there's probably two or three bad coins.
Each coin is hand-sorted, and some of them turn out to be very rare.
We have a penny there that's probably from, I believe, it's 1864.
Talk about Pennies from Heaven.
Almost a million dollars worth of coins is put back in circulation.
- Next exercise: 2000 Dodge Neon Covered in Toys Delights Town
- Previous exercise: Oldest Southern Rhino in the US Dies at 56