2. There’s a Facility With Robots That Shreds Old Money on Behalf of The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
On a daily basis, Federal Reserve Banks handle billions of dollars in currency. Within the Second District, served by The New York Fed, 19 million notes are processed each day at the East Rutherford Operations Center (EROC) in New Jersey, where robots are used to carry and transport cash. The process begins when banks deliver both coin and paper currency to the state-of-the-art facility using armored carriers. Following verification of the contents, the currency is fed into high-speed processing machines, which count each note at an average rate of 74,000 notes per hour, and bundle them into packages. This is also where the quality of the notes is inspected.
If a bill is unfit to be recirculated — if it’s too old or unable to be accepted into a vending machine, for example — it’s cut into “confetti-like shreds.” Destroyed currency will be replaced with new notes, each of which have an expected life expectancy. (A $1 bill is expected to survive 5.9 years, while a $100 bill has a life expectancy of seven years.) At the end of our tour, we were even give a pack of this shredded money, which contained 50 to 100 bills of varying denominations.
In addition to sorting currency, The EROC also tags suspected counterfeits, which are stamped and forwarded to the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security agency that maintains the integrity of the nation’s currency.