If you had 25 lbs. of aluminum cans sitting in your house, you’d recycle them so the metal in them could be used again, right? Well, what about that penny jar you’ve been keeping on the shelf all these years? Yup – another tiny way to help the environment is to roll up those pennies and get them out of your house and back into circulation. Our house recently turned in $42 in pennies weighing 25 pounds. It turns out the government minted about 9 billion pennies last year — pennies account for roughly half of all coins made each year — at a cost of more than $100 million dollars. About one-third of this money is used to pay for the zinc that pennies are made out of. In April, 2006, the New York Times reported that because of the increase in the cost of zinc, it was costing 1.4 cents to create each 1 cent penny. So many pennies are made because about half of the pennies made each year disappear from circulation within each year. In 1998, the General Accounting Office estimated that of the roughly 170 billion pennies then in existence, two-thirds had been effectively withdrawn from circulation by people keeping them in penny jars! If people would stop keeping penny jars, thousands of tons of zinc wouldn’t have to be mined each year. Better yet, the penny should be eliminated entirely since it no longer really serves any meaningful purpose. Check out www.retirethepenny.org for details.