I heard about this today on MSNBC. An organization called Common Cents has a project called "Penny Harvest Field" which has collected an estimated 100 million "pennies" (apologies to people who insist on the term "cents"; it's their choice of words, not mine) which were all dumped into a giant box at Rockefeller Center. A video flyover of the collection can be seen here. (http://www.commoncents.org/go.cfm/4A29F493-3048-32DA-1849D69F5EE1F1CF) According to the NY Times: "Penny Lane, or the Penny Harvest Field at Rockefeller Center, as it is officially called, will be placed on a pedestrian walkway between 50th and 51st Streets, and Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. The Harvest Field, which is sponsored by Tishman Speyer, the company that controls Rockefeller Center, will be open free to the public every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., through Dec. 31. By Saturday, volunteers — some from the 830 elementary and middle schools that organized penny-collecting campaigns — will begin emptying the sacks in a penny pour of sorts, filling a field that will stretch, curb to curb, 165 feet long and 30 feet wide, with pennies stacked 8 inches deep." "When the field closes, we will use two specialized vacuum trucks to literally suction the pennies out of the field! The pennies will be removed at a rate of $1,000 per minute and be emptied into twenty-five 20-foot cargo boxes. Throughout the night the cargo boxes will continually be trucked off-site. Over the next few days the pennies will be emptied into giant fortified duffle bags (ballistic bags). Yes, but the vacuum trucks will be wearing cotton gloves.
While researching this story, I found an interesting site that shows what different numbers of pennies would look like. The top picture is 100 million cents, the number in the Rockefeller center collection. The bottom picture is the number of cents in circulation (200 billion).
i read somewhere on another site about this story. they figured there was 64 tons of copper cents laying in that field! hya:i wonder how they keep people from stealing? that is going to be one good place to metal detect!
I've done my share. I haven't put a cent coin back into circulation in the past 10 years. I must have thousands of them!
read the coin chat forum I posted my toughts on this idea in the Coin Chat forum. Tell me what you think
