You know what they say: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
A waste management company in Pennsylvania has collected about $10 million in coins that’ve been tossed away over the years.
Fox Business reports how Ash Processing at Reworld — which is located in Morrisville, Bucks County — “bridges the divide between trash and treasure” by sorting through incinerated trash for loose change.
“What we have is a series of assorted materials,” explains employee Rebecca Guardino.
Adds she: “This is about the quarter-sized particles where we usually get…a little bit of hardware, but mostly quarters.”
Waste Advantage — a publication that “is solely dedicated to covering the solid waste and recycling industry with one publication and one price” — continues to report that the company’s machines finds these coins in the trash by forcing them through round holes, sorting them into bins.
They then, continues the same Waste Advantage article, go through a washing station to get all squeaky clean. Finally, they dry out on a rack to top off the process.
“This allows us to better sort the coins to determine what coins are in good condition or have been damage, but it also lets us know which denominations we’re dealing,” explains Guardino via the publication.
And since the company first got started, according to Fox Business, it’s managed to collect that aforementioned $10 million in change.
The same Fox article says that this process aims to restore value to these coins and to keep trash out of landfills.
