Jeff recently asked, “should we ban the penny to help the environment?” As the things pile up in jars all over our house, I wonder why we bother having them at all, and I was curious how bad they could be environmentally . According to Triple Pundit, Mikes Bikes, a bike store chain in California is no longer taking pennies. The store explains:
There were 4,010,830,000 pennies made in the United States last year; each one weighs 2.5 grams, so that’s a thousand tonnes of zinc to be mined. According to ilo.org, Zinc concentrate is produced by separating the ore, which may contain as little as 2% zinc, from waste rock by crushing and flotation, a process normally performed at the mining site. According to the Northern Alaska Environmental Center,
Zinc is useful stuff, used in galvanizing metal, building materials, and many products that we use every day. But it is crazy to move 50,000 tons of rock to get a thousand tonnes of zinc to make something that we barely use, that piles up in jars and bowls, and actually costs 1.79 cents to make. It really is time to ditch the penny. What do you think?
