elijah’s adventure

If you were to melt a penny minted between 1909 and 1982, what would the value of the resulting copper be? If you were to answer $0.0232822, you’d be right. That’s because pennies made in the good old days were 95% Copper. However, pennies minted between 1982 (both types were minted in 1982) and 2006 are 97.5% Zinc, which makes them worth approximately $0.0100983.

What do we do with this bit of information? I suggest we 1) buy millions of pennies, 2) sort the zinc ones from the copper ones, 3) melt the copper, and 4) sell the copper on the market or to a manufacturer.

1. We can buy pennies from banks. Or can we? Do banks remove copper pennies from circulation and transfer them to the Treasury or Mint? If this practice does not occur, what distribution of Copper vs Zinc pennies can we expect in circulation? Out of my collection of 158 pennies, 31% are Copper and 69% Zinc.

2. Fortunately, Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams and Zinc pennies weigh 2.5 grams. A penny slide incorporating a trap door that sorts heavy pennies from light pennies could be constructed. Hundreds of slides could be designed in parallel.

3. Does the copper need to be melted? That depends on the form factor that a potential manufacturer will need to construct his product. If the purchaser of copper prefers to utilize small bits of copper, the form factor is to our advantage. However, it may be necessary to melt the Copper into bars (like Gold bars?) before being delivered. The melting temperature of Copper is 1984.32 °F. How energy intensive and expensive would this process be?

4. If the copper must be sold on the market, where does it need to be trucked to? How do we find a manufacturer that purchases copper? Is there any demand for raw Copper in the States (where there is a readily available supply of pennies), or has all demand shifted to Asia?

To recap: If you were to buy $1 in pennies, 31 would be made of copper. The melt value of the copper coins is $0.7217 ($0.0232822 X 31). However, in the melting of these coins, 31 cents would be lost (as the currency is destroyed). Sixty-Nine Zinc pennies remain. $0.69 Zinc Pennies + $0.72 Raw Copper = $1.41. At first glance, there is a 41% return on the dollar. However, we have not yet included the cost of trucking the pennies to a sorting facility, melting them in a furnace, and the prerequisite labor.

Is this business plan legal? The article, Is it Illegal to Melt U.S. Coins?, refers to:
Section 331 of Title 18 of the United States code provides criminal penalties for anyone who fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the Mints of the United States. This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent.

Yes, it is. Interestingly enough, the same plan can be applied to Nickels, as all Nickels minted between 1946 and 2006 have a melt value of $.07.

What do you think about this business plan? Is it viable? Does it leave any money on the table? Does it overlook pitfalls?

More information can be found at Coinflation.com.