We can all throw our money away buying unnecessary items; however, some people are quite literally throwing their money away. Albion Environmental staff who were conducting compositional waste analyses began to discover a number of coins within the residual waste stream and decided to start monitoring. Data was collected over the past year in various areas of Scotland and to our surprise there was a large amount of coins in the waste stream, bringing a new meaning to ‘Money to Landfill’.
Maybe the coins were accidently put into the waste or is it possible that people don’t want to carry around a large amount of loose change and simply dispose of it; wouldn’t it be better to save the coins in a piggy bank and when full, donate to charity? It is unclear how much money is ‘wasted’ each year but from the waste samples we analysed, our figures show nearly £1.75 per tonne of residual waste.
This amount may seem irrelevant but if we consider that every year, in a city like Glasgow, an average of 200,000 tonnes of residual waste is collected, the value of the coins contained within the waste could be as much as £350,000. Furthermore, if we consider the residual waste production for Scotland, the value that would be saved by recovering coins is even more significant. The total quantity of household waste generated in Scotland in 2015 was 1.4 million tonnes with an estimated coin value of £2,450,000.
This all sounds great but remember you need to get a system which can separate the coins from the waste. We are doing it as part of the waste compositional analysis and as such are already getting paid to sort the waste!![\"dont](\"https://www.albion-environmental.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/dont-waste-money-photo.jpg\")
Albion staff from left to right: Jonathan Love, Les Thomson, Fabio Dalmonte
For further information on Waste Compositional Analysis please visit https://www.albion-environmental.co.uk/waste-analysis