Clean and longlasting banknotes - the way forward?
Clean and long lasting banknotes – the way forward?
What started nearly 20 years ago as an experiment now seems set to conquer the world.
In 1988 the Australian government launched its first banknotes made out of plastic, not paper, and in the years to follow all Australian banknotes were replaced by the new type.
The new banknotes are made of a special polymer plastic that makes them very resistant to dirt and moisture. The banknotes stay very clean and last up to 4 or 5 times longer before they need to be replaced with new ones. The other benefit is the much lower rate of counterfeited banknotes, the Australian Central Bank proudly shows a reduction of more than 90 percent since the introduction of the new banknotes in 1996. The polymer banknotes come equipped with a small transparent window which poses potential counterfeiters an important extra difficulty in simulating the banknotes.
The polymer banknotes at first seemed to be adopted only in Asia but lately these modern banknotes appeared in Europe, Latin-America and even Africa. Here in Europe, it is Romania which has replaced all of its banknotes with the new material since the year 2000 and again since 2005 for the redenominated Lei (RON) banknote series and the National Bank of Romania is reported to be very pleased with the banknotes.
With Turkish banknotes often being quite dirty, and with counterfeiting of higher value banknotes 20 and 50 YTL quite persistent, one can only hope that the Turkish Central Bank (TCMB) is considering this new technology, especially with the Romanian example so close by.
In fact there is an opportunity for the TCMB to introduce the new type banknotes at the same time when new banknotes are issued in 2009 of the type without the “Y” from the current Turkish banknotes. It would only seem logical.
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