In the United States, it cost more to make a penny than it’s worth!

“It costs almost 1.7 cents to make a penny,” said U.S. Mint director Ed Moy.  See original 2008 article here: Penny Problem.

Since it cost more to make a penny, why not start to make the pennies out of recycled plastic?

Plastic Penny

Think of the environmental benefits, those alone would be huge and since we could use recycled plastic, it would reduce the amount of plastic in landfills, not to mention the amount dumped into the ocean… like it was some type of huge liquid landfill (See Invisible war against our oceans).

Oh sure, such a program would cost more than making the penny out of plastic directly, but using recycled plastic would still be a huge decrease in the cost of the creation of pennies vs using metal, if we are smart about it…

I think it’s sad that inflation has been so rampant that it has decreased the value of a penny so much that it’s practically an inconvenience to carry them around.  Sadly, I’ve seen people throw pennies in the trash after receiving them as change.  I often wish there was a way to make a penny more valuable again, without incurring some type of drastic deflationary process that would hurt our economy instead of helping it.  Too bad there wasn’t a way that the government could do a strategic deflationary process…  Such a process would decrease the cost of items bought while giving everybody a boost by enabling the current currency that they own to be worth more.

Perhaps the strategic deflationary process would happen every 50 years?  It would have to be rare because it would be disruptive overall.

I wonder if I’ll live to see that time when eventually the 1 dollar bill falls to inflation to the point where it’s considered an inconvenience to carry?  Probably by that point all US coins (be it metal or plastic) would be too expensive to make.  I think the creation of plastic coins is something to be considered although hated I’m sure.  I wonder if there are other materials that might be a better option… hmmm

Interesting times we live in…

MR