Can any of you answer my question about copper coins?

Question

here is my situation. used to collect coins. was given and bought several collections. as a result i have a few hundred pounds of old copper pennies that were at one point in time wheat cents. all of the pennies with identifiable dates have been removed and sold. unfortunately both the obverse and reverse images have been almost completely eradicated by use. basically i have a few hundred pounds of copper slugs that at one point in time were wheat cents, legal tender. copper is currently over $3/lb at the recycling plant. i have weighed several samplings of these slugs and have come to an average of 175 slugs per lb. i have spent the last several hours searching the us mints website and several other gov websites to find out if it is legal and how to go about recycling these slugs. nothing that i have come up with specifically states that it is illegal to recycle them. have any numismatists run into this? how did you go about recycling the pennies?

Answer 1

some old pennys are still not pure copper go to wikipedia and search penney it will show the percentage of metals in every year if ou can see the year.

and as for recycling who cares if its illegal i would do it but as for melting it down copper has a melting point of around  1000 degress celsius.

Answer 2

There is not much you can do with dateless wheat cents. The reason no one wants them is they may end up in jail or have the secret service at their door. There is no law about not melting U.S. coins until the U.S. mint activates them at their discretion. This they have done for cents as well as nickels. None can be melted nor can large quantities be exported out of the U.S.. There is a problem world wide with coins that cost more to make than their value and Governments are cracking down sometimes quite hard on people melting or smuggling coins. An example is the Paise denominations from India they are smuggled next door to Bangladesh and meted to make other items such as pans. The government of India has really cracked down on this. Dateless coins have alwasy been a problem as well as real low grade ones. The usually get buffed up and made into jewelery. At least the Buffalo nickels and Mercury dimes. You will just have to wait and see what the mint does as well as congress.

Answer 3

It is currently illegal to melt copper coins but silver coins are legal figure that one out lol

anyway there is pennding legislation before congress to authorize melting pennys

check the web site of the congressional record for the staus of the current bill

Answer 4

its illegal to recycle pennies, as far as them being melted down, i'm not sure