This company wants some of it
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.
Americans toss an estimated 7.5 million tons of metal into landfills every year, including enough steel to build 90 Golden Gate Bridges and enough aluminum for 40 billion beer cans, according to Covanta. The Morristown, New Jersey-based company operates 45 waste-to-power plants in North America, China and Europe.
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.
To read the full story, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-12/trash-piles-yield-treasure-as-sifters-seek-sooty-coins-in-ashes.