What Happens to Old or Expiring Casino Chips?

I am curious about the life of chips. Now that chips are being replaced with "chip-in-chip" chips, what happens to the old chips? When a casino gets rebranded, are all the old chips destroyed? How are chips destroyed, since they seem to be indestructible?

Casino cheques, also known as chips, are disposed of in a variety of ways.

A lot of people take them home after forgetting to cash them in or to keep them as souvenirs. The casinos absolutely love when this happens: Cheques cost the casinos a fraction of their face value to buy, so they make the difference in profit when they're taken out of circulation.

The Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club has thousands of members who collect casino cheques. In particular, they descend on casinos that are closing or rebranding to buy up chips that are about to expire and will, at some point, be worth more than their face value.

They're not indestructible. Some casinos clean chips by washing them and the process wears them down enough so they have to be destroyed.

In the more freewheeling days of Las Vegas' past, chips were reported to have wound up as part of the foundations of new casinos under construction. But these days, they have to be accounted for. Gaming Control's "chip-destruction plan" requires submitting two documents when they're discontinued or destroyed for one reason or another.

And when they need to be destroyed? They're sent back to the manufacturers, where they're ground into dust by big machines, then generally wind up as landfill, though some companies manage to recycle some of the materials through their own processes.

What happens to old casino chips when a casino gets rebranded or closes and how, if they're destroyed, does that work?

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Marty Dec-01-2019

PLAYBOY CASINO (AC) CHIPS TURN UP AS  AN ARCHEOLOGICAL TREASURE (?)

The Playboy Casino that opened in 1981 and existed for three years has come back to life. At least many, many of its chips have! A recent construction site in Hernando, Mississippi has uncovered a vast hoard of Playboy Casino Atlantic City chips in many different denominations! 
At first glance collectors from the Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club, Inc. (CC>CC) were skeptical but delighted to be able to add previously unavailable Playboy casino chips to their collections. As the source of chips and the size of the discovery unfolded their delight turned into a need to find out the truth behind In Arpil 2008 a large amount of these chips were found buried in Hernando MS.  They were supposed to be destroyed by Green Duck Corp. but were instead buried.  While digging a hole for a new sidewalk thousands of these chips were discovered.  At one time these chips were ultra rare and sold for $1000's of dollars each.

O2bnVegas Dec-01-2019

tomorrow's QoD

Two years of high school French and I hardly remember any of it, but I'm tempted to take a shot:

Is there not a [hotel] swimming pool in Las Vegas which is open all year long?

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Kenneth Mytinger Dec-01-2019

Palms

Good QOD, Staff.  It reminds me - been several years since I've set foot in the Palms ... wonderin' if that chip collection on the walls near the cage is still there.

(of course, everything has been moved around/remodeled; so the collection, cage and all could have gone anywhere ...)

Question of the Day - 01 December 2019

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