…which is done mindlessly, while watching Burn Notice or something. Seriously. It’s not really an investment of time.
Yep, think of all the expense of mining the metals, the damage to the environment, all that the metal goes through to reach your hand in the form of a coin. Why throw away something that took so much to make, and has exact and predictable monetary value?
I consider that occasionally, but while a few coins isn’t much trash, it is a significant quantity of litter. Trash belongs in a trash disposal bin.
I (and all of us) throw away a wide array of carefully-crafted materials each day. Packaging? Food containers? Leftovers? Each carefully crafted and worth more than the change. I suppose the monetary value of these isn’t exact or predictable, but I’m not sure how that factors in.
Allow me to say that this is all very fascinating. It’s a nice demonstration of human cognitive variation; the logic seems so straightforward to me, and yet I’m clearly a major outlier.
I don’t care for carrying change, so I either give it to my husband, who LOVES change, or if I happen by a donation jar at the various stores where I shop before my husband gets it, I’ll put it all in there. The jars are usually for the Spay-Neuter League, or for the No Kill Animal Shelter in our area. Well worth it, in my opinion!
You are among an extremely small group of people that consider change ‘trash’. Only people who think change is trash would consider it littering.
I suppose if were you where buying things you were also standing on dirt or grass there would be a case for environmental ‘damage’ but most places you by things your standing on a constructed surface the worst case is it stays there till someone sweeps of vacuums. At that point it ends up in the trash anyway. Until then everyone who’s come by has had the opportunity to collect the coins rather then let them end up in our waste systems. Other people making use of your ‘trash’ is a better option.
I just gave my wife the contents of my change tub.
I told her to treat herself to a Spa day - the amount of change in that bin should easily pay for it.
I can’t believe that $0.24 per month is such a nuisance to deal with. I suspect there is some other motivation behind throwing money away and making a point to tell people about it.
I hate pennies, so whenever possible I leave them in tip jars or take-a-penny-leave-a-penny dishes. I do this because I feel like the pennies might be doing some good. Throwing them away seems wrong, even though I know there’s nothing you can buy for a penny or even a dime anymore.
I used to save my dimes, nickels, and pennies. The post office used to have a stamp vending machine that accepting pennies. Every time I needed stamps, I would go to the post office and redeem my small change into stamps.
I would supplement the change when I needed to get a specific amount.
I always hated to pay “real” money for stamps, so in my mind, I got my stamps for free.
Now that my cash transactions are few (as are my stamp purchases as I do online banking), I don’t have much change. When I do start to accumulate change, I usually carry about a dollars worth with me. If I do have a cash transaction, I can either give them the exact change or get change in even dollar amounts.
I keep quarters for the occasional quarter ante home poker game. I probably have about $50 in quarters in my jar.
Dang, you caught me – it’s a nefarious plot! Bwa ha ha ha!!!
I dump my change in a jar at the end of the day. This takes 10 seconds at best. Once every two years or so I take the jar to the Coinstar machine when I go shopping and get an Amazon gift certificate. This takes 10 minutes. I just don’t see where you are saving much time or effort.
I dump my daily change into a jar and let it accumulate. When it’s full, I throw the whole thing in the trash.
I like to throw my money away in bulk. 
One other point about having change that you might be overlooking is that you can use that change with another transaction, instead of breaking another bill. In my experience of being a frugal person for 43 years, using up your money completely instead of breaking a bill with every transaction makes your money go a lot further. I think the estimates of a couple of dollars a year are quite low. Also, I believe in the homily “look after the pennies and the dollars look after themselves.”
I agree with everyone else - don’t throw the change you don’t want away. Leave it somewhere for frugal people like me to snap up. 
I recently cashed in all my penny jars. I had 5 of them full to the top and I had been throwing pennies in them since 1995. I came out with a little more than 54.00
That makes:
54.00 / 15 years = $3.60 year
$3.60 / 365 days = 0.98¢ per day (OK I forgot leap years but you get the idea)
So even though I use a lot of cash transactions, I almost never reused pennies and just threw them in jars for 15 years. As you can see $54 for 15 years isn’t much. Especially when you break it down over the years you can see it’s less than a penny a day.
I used to get a kick out of the book “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” where Francie’s grandmother tells Francie’s mother to try to save a nickel a day. In ten year you will have a “small fortune,” enough to buy some land. .05 X 365 X 10 = $182.50
I wonder how much you’d have to save today to be able to buy land today? The story took place in Brooklyn.
I think your logic is sound, and not really open to criticism. It IS a trivial amount of money, whether you keep it to spend later, give it to charity, or leave it for kids to find. I don’t think you’re unusual in your willingness to get rid of it. I think you’re unusual in the amount of change you deal with. Most of us get significantly more change in our daily lives, and that’s why we don’t do as you do.
We also like to talk about ourselves, so I’ll just mention that I have a 3-liter bottle that fills up every 3-5 years and generates about $350 when full.
Putting it in the garbage just seems so wrong, maybe illegal? But NTL the best sign I ever saw at a register was at my Yoga studio, it said, “If you fear change, leave it here”.
Why not just put your change in a collection box?
I once knew a girl who kept her pennies and once a year went to the elementary school and placed stacks of pennies in out-of-the-way places for some wide-eyed 8 year old to find.
I loved that idea.
Also, the coinstar machines are awesome for coin hoarders like myself. I hated rolling nickels for trivial amounts of return, but now I just dump the whole can into the machine and it gives me the cash equivalent. Magic!
I live in Canada where we have dollar and two-dollar coins, so I get hundreds of dollars when I put my coins in a couple times a year.
All that said, while I found your decisions abhorrent on an irrational level - You’re literally throwing money away - I mean we have cliches against that very thing - I can understand why you do it. Your lack of actual money exchanges probably puts you at the forefront of the totally cashless society that is coming in the coming decades.
Have you ever heard the expression “Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themself” attributed to Benjamin Franklin
I don’t understand the people who regularly use Coinstar; my bank has a coin-counting machine and you can either access it yourself at the downtown branch, or drop off your coins at your nearest bank…where they will be trucked to the downtown branch and counted within a couple of days.
Zero fee if you’re a bank customer.
Personally I like to go to the downtown branch and do it myself, because there’s something fun about my beer bucket of change disappearing into a whirling machine and then a bank teller handing me cash for it.
I should mention I bartend, so I take home a lot of coin change–most of it quarters–and my beer bucket usually makes about $1200-$1500 a year.
Coinstar is NOT going to get 9% of that!