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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 2623798, member: 27832"]If the day comes when melting copper cents is legal, I wonder if there would be enough volume (economy of scale) to have dedicated refinement processes, optimized for the cent's composition, costing less than the generic refinement process, and thus supporting higher prices? Let's see: to simplify, let's assume no wheat cents get melted, but ALL copper LMCs are recovered and melted, except for the 1982 issues. The total mintage of Lincoln cents, all mints, from 1959-1981, is around 141 billion. That's a lot of cents! At around 3g of copper per coin, that's about 400 billion grams, 400 million kg, or 400,000 tons. Annual copper production in the US is over one million tons, and annual supply from recycling apparently amounts to somewhere between a quarter and a half of that. That implies that we're already recycling the equivalent of every copper LMC ever made, every year. Even if there's a great rush to melt and recycle cents once it's legalized, it'll be a relatively small part of the existing copper-recycling flow. There just aren't enough copper cents in existence to serve as a sustainable, high-volume source of copper. On the other hand, I imagine silver coin melting and recycling is a tiny fraction of the overall silver recycling stream, but the volume of 90% silver is apparently high enough to justify special treatment and advantageous rates from refiners. So, I still don't know.[/QUOTE]