Mint.ca "recycling of over 1 Billion circulation coins"

[ZenOps]

http://www.mint.ca/store/news/royal-can ... t+the+Mint

• The production of 1.1 billion Canadian circulation coins and the recycling of over 1 billion circulation coins in 2011

ARP. And I'm pretty sure that most of those 1 Billion coins were 99.9% pure nickel quarters (1968 to 1999) which were mostly replaced with 2.2% nickel quarters.

As far as I can tell, they are chewing up the pure nickel quarters at an astonishing rate. I'm pretty sure they just plan on calling in *all* pennies at some point in time, and not even bother to sort them other than magnets, just do one "great melt" on them.

I don't know if they are going to move to dimes, or if they are just going to leave the dimes as table scraps. Thank god they haven't touched the nickels yet, we only produced 1.85 billion pure nickels total, and if they can cull 1 billion per year - it can be snapped up nearly instantly.

[mickeyman]

I'm pretty sure they have been taking dimes for some time as well.

The percentage of pure nickel dimes dropped dramatically after the Alloy Recovery Program started. Same for quarters.

Because dimes and quarters tend to circulate, they are likely to get swept up. Pennies and nickels tend to end up in jars, so there is always a supply of them trickling into banks.

[ZenOps]

They for sure have not been culling dimes here in Calgary - yet.

I do the occassional silver hunt on dimes, and I'm still getting a good 35% pure nickel dime rate at least. The quarters are definitely being culled though.