Date Posted: June 29, 2011
Print Edition: June 24, 2011
Bills will no longer be printed on paper in an effort to prevent counterfeiting
By Alex Watkins (The Cascade) – Email
Counterfeiters will soon be faced with mounting new challenges in reproducing bank notes, as the Bank of Canada has officially unveiled the designs for their new $50 and $100 bills. The upcoming change – which has been in the works since it was announced in 2006 – is unique in that it will see Canada begin printing notes on polymer instead of cotton paper.
This method was first implemented by the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1988 and has since been adopted by 32 other countries, according to the June 2010 issue of the Bank of Canada Review. The first $100 notes are to begin circulating in November 2011, and the $50 notes will follow soon after in March 2012.
The project was conceived after significant increases in bill counterfeiting between 2001 and 2004 – to levels noted in the Bank of Canada Review as “very high by Canadian and international standards” – left many retailers reluctant to accept bills in large denominations. In fact, the review reported that “in some regions in 2002, almost one in ten Canadian retailers displayed a sign indicating that they did not accept $100 bills.” The release of the new polymer bills will be a stepping stone following numerous efforts by the Bank of Canada to increase bill security and educate retailers on how to identify counterfeit notes, as well as to reduce the amount of falsified notes in circulation and crack down on those who produce them.
The Bank of Canada estimated that the cost of implementing the new system could be as high as $75-100 million, as “the equipment that accepts, processes, or dispenses bank notes must be adapted by financial institutions, cash processers, retailers, and others that accept bank notes.” However, it noted that when weighed against the relative costs and weaknesses of the current system, consumers will benefit in the long run.
The Bank of Canada claims that the new notes will also serve as a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper bills, as they are more resistant to wear-and-tear and soiling and thus need to be replaced less often. While some countries already using the polymer bills report that they last as much as four times longer than paper, the bank’s review team “estimated conservatively that in the Canadian environment the notes would last at least 2.5 times longer, on average, than their paper equivalents.”
Reducing the amount of bills produced will reportedly reduce not only the environmental impact of growing, processing, and printing cotton for bills, but also the waste and pollution generated by transporting new and worn notes back and forth; as an added feature, “when the polymer notes reach the end of their useful life and have been verified and destroyed by the Bank, they will be recycled.”
The designs for bills of smaller denominations have not yet been made public, though the Bank of Canada review stated that they will be “revealed when the $20, $10, and $5 denominations of the Polymer series are unveiled some months before each is issued through 2012–13.”
