Below are workers sorting U.S. coins by quality and denomination.

          There is no fixed order for sorting and cleaning coins. Sometimes coins are cleaned before being sorted, sometimes coins are sorted before being cleaned. It depends on which workers (sorting workers or cleaning workers) become available first.

Method 1: Spinning/vibrating machine with special polishing stones and water.

Method 2: High pressure water-gun.

Below are the vibrating machines (left) and spinning machines (right):

          In the images below a worker is cleaning some Euro cent coins using a spinning machine, water and polishing stones (you can see little stones mixed in with the coins).

Coins are dried on the ground by wind and sun after cleaning.

          Below are workers sorting coins by quality and denomination. The coins mixed in with the scrap metal are in full denomination. The reason the 5 cent and 1 cent coins cannot be seen is that they are not economically worth shipping back to redeem. There are large quantities of 5 cent and 1 cent coins mixed in with the scrap metal, and they are melted down together with scrap metal for recycling.

          Coins are sorted by quality and denomination after cleaning. The composition of each quantity of unsorted recovered coins is approximately: 30% Tier 1 (circulation quality), 35% Tier 2 (UNCURRENT quality), 30% Tier 3 (MUTILATED quality) and 5% useless items (such as tokens, slugs, fused coins, bottle caps etc).

          Below are workers sorting out coins by quality.