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Paper or plastic for your money?
By Julie
Sturgeon • Bankrate.com
We swelled the heads of presidents Lincoln and Jackson. We ran a special thread through our money
that glows in the presence of ultraviolet light. By early 2004,
we'll fork over colorized $20 bills in restaurants.
And still Americans don't take the prize for the most
modern strides in money production.
Australians claim that trophy with their polymer bills
that hit streets down under between 1992 and 1996. More than 20
countries followed, including Mexico, China, Indonesia, Singapore,
Thailand, Nepal, Brazil and even Kuwait. This plasticized version
offers special coatings that feature at least one clear window on
the bill, and it's virtually impossible to start a tear.
Plastic vs. paper
Peter Carlin, the senior manager of currency operations
for the Reserve Bank of Australia, loves to tick off the advantages
when he takes his show on the road to places such as the Interpol
10th International Conference on Counterfeiting:
Polymer money doesn't absorb sweat from palms or disintegrate
if you leave it in your jeans pocket when you do the wash. It
repels dirt. It doesn't go limp after several hundred foldings.
That's why these bills last four to five times longer than the
cotton counterparts, he touts. And when they finally die, the
recycled granules make excellent plastic garden products such as
wheelbarrows and compost bins.
Security prompted the Aussies to explore polymer as
far back as 1966.
"At that time, Australia moved to a new series
of paper bank notes that included what were then considered to be
state-of-the-art security features," he tells audiences. "Within
one year, however, high quality counterfeits of the new $10 note
had been produced and widely distributed.
"Not surprisingly, the Reserve Bank of Australia's
confidence in the existing bank note technology was severely shaken.
It took the view that counterfeiting problems could only get worse
with further advances in reprographic techniques already on the
horizon."
According to Ronald G. Gration, technical manager
for Securency Pty Ltd. -- the company in charge of slapping on the
security features to the notes -- Australia's Guardian substrate
polymer brand produces sharper portrait definitions.
It can incorporate security threads ranging from magnetic
to fluorescent, phosphorescent, microprinted, clear text, windowed
and machine-readable. It accepts straight and wavy patterns. It
holds any color, and you can change colors on the bill's flip side.
And those specialty security inks developed for paper money work
just as well on polymer.
Our southern hemisphere friends didn't corner the
market on counterfeiting. The U.S. Secret Service owes its life
to this crime, only adding more familiar duties such as presidential
protection a few years after its 1865 inception.
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