you know you see pennies nickels dimes and quarters on the floor every now and then...if no one picks it up, and the janitor sweeps at night, and he doesnt see it. its ends up in the landfill... or, a dollar bill is stuck to something, unnoticed and trashed... and im sure theres plenty of other ways it happens too...how much do you think ends up there? i bet its at least a million dollars a year...
That's the reason the government prints and mints new currency all the time. If they didn't, there would be a depression.
I use to work at a land fill as a laborer. At one point my job was to go through the trash looking for recyclable cardboard and remove it form the other stinky crap. One day there was a roll-off bin dumped and it looked like the contents belonged to a old man, who had recently died and had his belongings throw out. There was a sorts of crazy shit. Old beer (stubby bottles), old food, old furniture and other random old things. Even found an old 1940’s Skin Mag. Then one of my buddies found a stack of old letters with stamps still attached. Not being a stamp collector I had no idea, but some of the stamps were later found to be worth a little bit of money. I never found any money, but there were a lot of bottles and cans that were thrown out, that in itself could be worth a lot of money over time.
If you were going to go digging in landfills for loose change, why not try and recycle computers instead? The gold used in wiring and the scrap metal you'd harvest would probably be worth more, given an equal amount of time and effort.
Yea the government actually takes that into account, as well as how long money will last before it wears out or just disintegrates and is unusable, when they are printing money. Not really, you have to have an unrealistic amount of scrap computers to be able to get enough metals out of it for it to be economically viable. The computer junkyard industry nearly ran itself out of business trying to do that before they realized that the integrated circuits were worth way more.
I dunno but they're 'greening' everything so they can ease up on the landfilling. Now they make shoes that are biodegradable, they'll disappear in 20 yrs instead of 100.