“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is a phrase that is near and dear to a Pennsylvania waste management facility that is working to bridge the gap between trash and treasure on a large scale — collecting $10 million in lost coins since its inception.
“What we have is a series of diverse materials,” Rebecca Guardino, Reworld’s ash processing manager, told FOX Business’ Jeff Flock as they were sorted into a box inside the facility on Monday.
“It’s about quarter-sized particles, where we normally get a few devices, but mostly quarters,” she added.
Fluke traveled to Morrisville, Pennsylvania to see the processes happening in real time, walking around the building to watch machines sift through burned trash, forcing the coins to fall through the round holes before sorting them into bins.
Once sorted, the coins pass through the washing station to emerge shiny as new and are spread out on a rack to dry.
“This allows us to better sort the coins, identify which coins are in good condition or which are damaged, but it also allows us to know what denominations we are dealing with,” Guardino explained during Monday’s “Morning with Maria” segment. While the herd was sifting through a mountain of coins.
According to Reworld estimates, Americans throw away about $68 million in coins every year — and the buckets of pennies, quarters, nickels and dimes they collect are a testament to that.
A recent Wall Street Journal report stated that the company began collecting coins in 2017 after noticing a large amount of them in the trash.
Of the $10 million in coins recovered, only $6 million was in good enough condition to be turned over to a third party to be counted and deposited in local banks, the same report said.
Coin harvesting is only a small part of what Reworld does, Guardino says.
“We process about 20 million tons of waste a year,” Lovelock said.
It’s all a way to restore the value of discarded coins and keep trash out of the landfill.