Who’s collecting pre 82 pennies for copper value

I’m pretty sure the ban on melting pennies is directed at industrial production, it’s only provable and interesting to law if you have tons of pennies being fed into a commercial smelting furnace;
95/05 Cu-Zn, great brass stock, I think they’re sorted with a machine that removes about 99.5% of the plated pennies, that little bit of extra zinc is nothing

there’s a huge outfit selling pre-82s for 75% melt, though price hasn’t changed since the recent 10% inflation;
Any size lot, 5,000 coins to a truckload

It’s banking on the inevitable end of coin and lift on the ban, whoever wants a great heap of industrial commodities in long term storage wins that bet;
If I was an eccentric billionaire I’d buy an old dry mine and stuff it full of pennies

Manually sorting pennies for profit is like making nails on an anvil, tons of poorhouse fun, almost as profitable as selling homemade charcoal

 

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https://www.federalregister.gov/doc...rotect the coinage of,cent and one-cent coins.

 

Canada produced their last 1 cent coin in 2012.No problem. Efforts in the US were stymied by political rivalry in 2017. The next wave of sanity will wash over the US cent like a tidal wave. Common sense will prevail

 

Why am I reminded of being 3 years old and my father saying, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!!!"

 

Definitely not a hard rule, like I suggested it’s designed to mitigate large scale destruction of circulated coin, not to protect precious federal artifacts from the barbarous vandals

 

I couldn’t help doing an estimate on total copper memorial pennies produced,
At 34,000/cubic foot,
roughly 140,000,000,000 pennies minted would fill about 700 full sized cargo containers (to the top and very over weight),
end to end the containers would stretch about 6 1/2 miles

 

Now look at it another way. The total minted weighs about 480,000 tons. The world mines about 20 million tons of copper per year. All the US copper cents ever coined (since 1909 I presume) is 2% of the copper mined in a single year.

 

Is that (Long Tons - Gross Tons), (Short Tons - Net Tons), or Metric Tons?

 

I guess it was metric tons, not sure. They're all only 10% different from each other anyway so it doesn't really affect my point. There's a lot of copper, and all of the US cents ever coined is a minuscule portion of it. According to USGS, there are 2.1 billion (metric) tons of copper in identified resources, and 3.5 billion tons undiscovered. That's a hundred years worth of annual mining. My point obviously is that hoarding copper from picking it out of change and then storing vast quantities hoping to make a profit seems like a waste of time, unless you just like doing it.

 

2% of world production is quite a bit for a useless trinket, but your right, copper is a semiprecious metal, meaning it’s critical but abundant, not quite as laborious to move as oil but definitely not worth anything as a financial investment unless you own a big dry hole and heavy equipment that is underutilized