IF YOU don’t believe that if you look after the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves, then look away now.

According to the Royal Mint, there is £400 million in loose change hanging round the nation’s homes.

And according to Coinstar, the loose-change counting machine company, we are now so broke we are exchanging a staggering £1 million a day.

Despite charging 8.9p for every pound of loose change exchanged, Coinstar’s business is booming. They have 1,700 machines in the UK, double the number of eight years ago and these machines are handling more than 200,000 transactions each week at 600 coins per minute.

“In these cash-strapped times every penny counts,” says Coinstar’s Nick Harris. “We are processing 40,000 tonnes of loose change each year.”

The machines take all the loose change poured into a funnel. The amount due is then totted up and can either be made over to charity or a voucher for cash to be paid out at the customer service desk.

Whatever you do with your coins, it can add up to a tidy sum, as one Bournemouth man is happy to confirm. “I chuck all my change in a jar and every three or four months take it to the machine at Sainsbury’s in Christchurch. I get around £30 or £40 which I spend on the shopping.”

The average haul is £28 per customer but one man in south London recently walked away with £5,677, an amount which the company says would have taken four hours to process.

And even this pales into insignificance compared to the amount exchanged by Alabama resident Edmond Knowles, who cashed in 1,308,459 pennies (or $13,084.59) at his local Coinstar machine.

But it’s not all about the money. Blogger James Watson dedicated a whole site to the items that had been rejected by his local Coinstar machine. Among the items he found and photographed included washers, tablets and ringpulls.

“These things I find are almost like time capsules,” he enthused. “They hark back to a story. It’s almost a modern form of archaeology.”

And, like archaeology, it can be just as lucrative. One report claimed Watson had discovered 31.34 in Euro coins abandoned in British Coinstar machines – that’s £27.80. In loose change. Just lying around.