Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

But really, the eddy currents aren’t even close to being the most interesting equipment and process here. David walks me over to a four-foot-tall metal bin positioned just beneath a bathroom-size box he calls the “coin tower.” From the coin tower, high-speed round projectiles are shot into the bin at irregular intervals less than a second apart. I step forward to get a better look, and Jack taps my shoulder and suggests I be careful. “You don’t want to get hit in the eye,” he says. So I lean over carefully, and there, piled a foot high against the sides of the metal bin, are beat-up U.S. quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Next to the filling bin is another bin, a full bin of coins that fell from the pockets of Americans who had more pressing matters than loose change. According to Jack, an average junked U.S. automobile contains $1.65 in loose change when it’s shredded. If that’s right—and from what I see, I believe that it must be—then the 14 million cars scrapped in good years (good for automobile recyclers, at least) in the United States contain within them more than $20 million in cash just waiting to be recovered. Understandably, Huron Valley isn’t interested in revealing just how much money they recover from U.S. automobiles (they have a deal whereby they return the currency to the U.S. Treasury for a percentage of the original value), but David is willing to note that the coin recovery system has “paid for itself.”