Realcent.org

The biggest constraints on the market for U.S. copper cents are:
1) It's illegal to melt them in th U.S.
2) It's illegal to ship them in bulk to potential buyers outside the U.S.
3) Potential buyers in the U.S. can always "mine" their own copper

With the "mine your own copper" option drying up in Canada has there been an increase in demand for copper cents there?

To answer your question, the market in Canada has shown no real improvement. Most of the ads that I saw were for about 1.1X and the best was 1.5X, but always for small quanitities and that is only in some provinces. I heard a ''rumor'' from my bank tellers that only 25% of the minted coins were returned.

Food for thought....

Gresham's law.
They will be hoarded as collector items as they are not being produced.
That will go for all pennies.

Sounds like its best to keep waiting to see if the market improves.

mtalbot_ca wrote: I heard a ''rumor'' from my bank tellers that only 25% of the minted coins were returned.

Quite possible, I still get the occasional rolls at my credit union and still haven't
caught up on sorting so besides the copper I'm also "unintentionally hoarding"
zinc and steel core as well. Someone I know said their dad wanted even the steel
ones so I once I sort them even my steel and zinc will mostly just move to
someone else's hoard. (I leak a few steel cents back into circulation here and
there making exact payments.)

The main reason I've fallen behind on sorting is I've been doing the slow process
of carefully looking over every coin that looks somewhat good. I'm assembling a roll
of each of the better looking 2001 and up coins before I let those go. The zinc 1997-
2000 and copper I can look through later to separate "collection" from "hoard".
I've got a fairly big bucket of 1997-2000 so it won't be hard finding good examples
of each year in there. Once I fill out those rolls I can speed the process back up by
bulk "magnet sorting" the steel out before I separate the rest by hand.

mtalbot_ca wrote:I heard a ''rumor'' from my bank tellers that only 25% of the minted coins were returned.

Is that 25% of all the pennies ever minted returned since a year ago? That's actually a loot higher than I would have thought... considering that a lot of them are simply lost over the years, and a lot more may already have been recycled by the mint over the years. Don't they supposedly cull excessively worn or damaged coins of all denominations? If 25% have been returned and destroyed since they stopped distributing pennies, the survival rate is much lower than 75%...

scyther wrote:

mtalbot_ca wrote:I heard a ''rumor'' from my bank tellers that only 25% of the minted coins were returned.

Is that 25% of all the pennies ever minted returned since a year ago? That's actually a loot higher than I would have thought... considering that a lot of them are simply lost over the years, and a lot more may already have been recycled by the mint over the years. Don't they supposedly cull excessively worn or damaged coins of all denominations? If 25% have been returned and destroyed since they stopped distributing pennies, the survival rate is much lower than 75%...

I've been interested in these figures to. If anyone has any estimates as to how many pennies were destroyed in the years prior to and after they started removing them, I'd love to hear about it.

I'll ask tomorrow during my bank run if they have any details.