Money as
Industrial
Waste
The Business of Recycling
Greenbacks at the Bureau
of Engraving and Printing
From its early days, the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing (BEP) was conscious of the environmental impact and
waste resulting from its operations, especially when it came to dealing with scrap
currency paper and notes redeemed by the
Treasury. As a result, the BEP continually
tried to minimize waste by reducing scrap,
reusing old notes and recycling paper by
turning it into pulp. However, in the many
years before the first Earth Day, the BEP’s
efforts were not so much seen as working
to save the planet as they were working to
save money and to be a good neighbor in
Washington, DC.
When the BEP first began operations
in the Treasury building in the 1860s, the
Treasury was in charge of dealing with
currency paper waste disposal. It did so
by burning mutilated and imperfect bills
along with scrap paper and redeemed
currency. This was done in a small outbuilding near the present-day Ellipse that
housed an incinerator. During burning,
the smoke was forced through a water
filter to prevent any partially burned notes
from going up and out of the chimney.1
Despite this precaution, it was not unusual
Historical Resource Center, BEP
By Dr. Franklin Noll
(Top) Macerator in the Treasury building, 1910.
(Bottom) Macerating room in the Treasury building, 1895.
for charred pieces of notes to drift over the
surrounding neighborhood in a haze of
thick smoke.2 After the burning operation,
the ashes, described as metallic in nature,
were removed from the furnace and piled
around the building.3 Fortune hunters
would search these piles for note fragments that they would piece together and
attempt to redeem from the Treasury.
Not surprisingly, the Treasury and the
BEP found this method of dealing with
waste paper less than satisfactory. However, they were bound by law to destroy
any security paper by burning. It was not
until June 1874 that Congress passed a law
allowing the Treasury to use other means
64 Financial History | Spring/Summer 2011 | www.MoAF.org
to take care of the problem, specifically the
maceration of paper into a pulp. Later that
year, a macerator was installed in the basement of the Treasury building.
One account described the macerator
as being 12 feet in diameter and fitted with
over 100 stationary and rotating knives.4
Later macerators were said to consist of
one or two cylinders, each measuring six
feet tall and four feet in diameter and
installed beneath the floor of the macerating room.5 In either case, the macerating process was the same. The money
was dumped in through a hatch atop the
macerator, which was about half full of
a mixture of water, soda ash and lime.