Copper at $3.50 a Pound Leads to Housing Troubles
In this post on another site the author talks about houses being broken into and having their plumbing stolen. For the copper. 
The US Mint got a law passed that says it’s illegal to melt down pennies. According to that second article, the metal in a penny was worth about 1.12 cents, and a nickle (which is also made mostly of copper and some zinc) was worth almost six cents. I say “was” because the copyright on the article is from 2006. I found another site that shows updated values based on current spot metal prices, and here’s what they show for a few days ago:
Pennies from 1982 and earlier that are 95% copper are worth 2.5 cents.
Pennies from 1982 and later that are mostly zinc are worth 6/10th of a cent.
The problem is that even nickel is getting expensive… modern nickels are worth about 6.8 cents right now.
A few days ago I tossed some pennies into my back yard for my kids to find with their junior metal detector. I guess I should have checked the dates first. 