Pennies

• cost more to produce than they're worth
• have a huge environmental footprint
• COVID-19 can live for up to 5 days on them (coins are potential super spreaders!)

COVID-19 taught us not to touch our faces and to wash our hands frequently. Why not also get rid of disease vectors, like coins?

Some quick stats (mostly from Smithsonian Magazine): 

• every year, 46,000 megawatt hours are used to produce pennies. This is roughly the same as driving an electric car 200 million miles. 
• every year, roughly 22,000 tons of zinc and 560 tons of copper are mined, smelted, refined, and made into pennies. Imagine all the other uses of those precious metals that we are stealing from our children to make pennies! 
• your tax dollars, more than $500 million of them annually, are spent to make pennies! 
• because of concerns around counterfeiting, zero pennies are recycled, despite being made out of valuable metals. Not...a...single...one. 

Enough? Sign the petition, and call your senators.