Pennsylvania waste management facility collects millions of dollars worth of tossed out coins

The expression "one man's trash is another's man's treasure" is near and dear to one Pennsylvania waste management facility that bridges the divide between trash and treasure on a massive scale – collecting $10 million in lost change since its inception.

"What we have is a series of assorted materials," Rebecca Guardino, Director of Ash Processing at Reworld, told FOX Business' Jeff Flock as they sorted through a bin inside the facility on Monday.

"This is about the quarter-sized particles where we usually get… a little bit of hardware, but mostly quarters," she added.

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Flock traveled to Morrisville, Pennsylvania to see the operations happen in real time, where he walked around the building to watch machines sift through incinerated trash, forcing coins to fall through round holes before they're sorted into bins.

Once sorted, the coins go through a washing station to come out shining like new and are spread out on a rack to dry.

"This allows us to better sort the coins, to determine what coins are in good condition or have been damaged, but it also lets us know which denominations we're dealing with," Guardino explained during the "Mornings with Maria" segment, Monday, as Flock sifted through a mountain of coins.

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According to Reworld's estimations, Americans throw away approximately $68 million in change each year – and the buckets of pennies, quarters, nickels and dimes they collect are a testament of that.

A recent Wall Street Journal report said the company began collecting the coins in 2017 after noticing a considerable amount of them in the trash. That same report said, of the $10 million in coins that are recovered, only $6 million have been in good enough shape to turn over to a third party to be counted and deposited to local banks.

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Guardino says the coin-harvesting process is only a fraction of what Reworld does, however.

"We process about 20 million tons of waste a year," she told Flock. 

It's all a way to restore value to coins that have been thrown away and keep trash out of the landfill.

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