Video: When the Fed constantly replaces old, tattered dollar bills with new, crispy cash, millions of notes get pulled out of circulation while new dollar bills get put in circulation. So what happens to all that old money? It gets shredded. But then what?
Until recently, those shredded notes just went into landfills, but now the Fed has developed a recycling process to turn all those dollars into soil. That soil can be used to plant trees and vegetables and fruit and so forth. So while trading millions of dollars for a pile of dirt seems a little kooky, it’s so much better than having those paper shreds sit around as garbage. Plus, it’s just neat to see all that money turn into dirt.