Meet the Government's Brown Nickel Nobody Wants to Use

Officials at the U.S. Mint have been looking into cheaper ways to make our smallest coins, Fortune reports, and the latest cost-saving proposition is a brown nickel made out of a copper alloy. The coin would be the same size as an existing nickel, but the color and weight of a penny. Making a copper-plated nickel out of zinc is just one of six possible metal alloys for U.S. coins identified by the Mint. The Mint has been researching cheaper ways to make pennies, nickels, and dimes because produc...