Italians were receiving the small copper coins as change but were not spending them, claimed Sergio Boccadutri, the member of the ruling center-left Democratic Party who proposed the measure. [...]
Since the euro was introduced in 2004, Italy has spent millions on manufacturing the coins, whose inside is made of iron and whose outside is copper.
In Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland, prices are often rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 cents to avoid using the smaller denominations, though they remain legal tender. [...]
In 2013 the European Commission reported that the difference between production costs for the small coins and their face value since their introduction had grown to more than 1.4 billion euros (US $1.8 billion at the time).
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