Cash industry on road to sustainability

Currency & Payment Consultant, Reconnaissance International

It is exciting to talk about the future, about what is new, but sometimes a mature product can surprise and delight. Cash, coins and banknotes, and the ‘industry’ that makes and supports them is perhaps one such example. When it comes to sustainability and environmental impact, one might assume that a digital payment has a significantly lower environmental impact than cash, but a new paper, ‘Cash: a roadmap to sustainability,’ challenges that perception. It also describes an industry working and succeeding in being a ‘good citizen.’

The paper puts this work in the context of research by central banks into the environmental impact of cash and debit cards which, while confirming that cash does have a higher environmental impact, shows both that the order of magnitude is similar, and the impact is extremely small. Cash represents 0.009% of the environmental impact of the Dutch economy, for example. organisations 106 examples of what they have done to reduce their environmental impact from the creation of coins and banknotes through their issue and circulation to their destruction. This offers real examples, and inspiration, for others working with cash in particular, and manufacturing in general, about what is possible.

Motivation for change

Self-interest. Working with the companies to write this paper, a number of drivers became apparent behind their work. Clearly profit, the bottom line, matters to

companies and customers. Re-designing printing presses, destruction equipment or ATMs to use less electricity, installing telematics into armoured cash trucks so they use less fuel, reducing water usage in paper mills, inventing processes that mean solid waste no longer needs to go to landfill or generating your own electricity from solar panels on the factory roof benefit shareholders, customers, and the planet.

Community. Read the Portals and Louisenthal paper mill case studies and you see organisations who are investing to use less water, cleaning it to higher standards and looking after their water sources not because of regulations (they meet them already) or to save money but because they are embedded in their communities. Alongside this, many companies are not just reducing their waste, but recycling what remains. For example, CCL and De La Rue – both suppliers of polymer substrates - are moving towards 100% recycling of polymer banknotes, whilst Giesecke + Devrient policies ensure that no production waste goes to landfill.

‘On a mission.’ If you read the work done by Oberthur Fiduciaire, a French printing company, Vaultex, a UK cash processing company, or Loomis, a Swedish Cash-in Transit (CIT) company, you will see a systematic, end-to-end approach to reducing their environmental impact. In fact, to name three is unfair on the remainder of the industry, but it is clear these companies have put sustainability at the heart of what they are doing.

The one group missing here, are customers. Central banks such as the European Central Bank (ECB) are active around sustainability, but it is rare for tenders to require more than those suppliers adhere to ISO 14001. The changes being made by the industry are largely self-motivated.

Importance of staff engagement

Staff activity features in a number of case studies. The Royal Dutch Mint and Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions, both with new sites into which sustainability was designed from the outset, introduced innovative changes involving their staff. Vaultex initiated what it called a ‘Green Pathway’ seeking and achieving staff driven change.

While the paper has examples of largescale projects, solar power, water treatment, red-design products etc., the smaller scale projects are largely staff driven. They do, of course, provide examples of change which any size company, however thin their margins or small their resources, can do.

Role of innovation

Innovation comes in many forms. The Royal Australin Mint funded its solar panel farm through an innovative deal with its energy supplier. De La Rue and Crane Currency, both printers with factories in Malta, reduced the temperature of their buildings, one through a ‘cool roof’ and the other through insulation. Komori separating waste and turning waste into a valuable material to achieve zero industrial waste emissions. The ink maker Luminescence decided to move to laundering cleaning cloths rather than using one-use cloths. The Philippines Central Bank changed its rules so that banks could exchange notes and coins directly with each other rather than shipping them back to the central bank first. The UK’s Post Office found a charity that needed elastic bands and now supplies them with its excess requirement.

Co-operation

A particularly interesting example of co-operation is the UK’s Cash Industry Environmental Charter (CIEC) group. Initiated originally by NatWest Bank, 34 organisations came together to focus on energy, plastics and carbon. Data is, of course, the starting point of innovation and this group has been meeting monthly to share metrics and initiatives. This highly informal group is driving real change by sharing what they are doing, who they work with and what works and what does not. Some companies have set out to have a wider impact as part of their environmental work. Oberthur, for example, decided to work with a local supplier to invent a new process to treat its wastewater. For a recycling project it identified a local start-up and worked with them to create a low-tech solution. It has now followed a similar process with other local companies on other projects.

Future

Cash must be the world’s most used product. Despite the experience of those living in the developed world, most the world’s population continues to depend on cash. It will be with us for longer than the digitally enabled think and so it is important that the cash industry continues to strive for sustainability. This paper did not include the plans of the industry to eliminate ‘green washing’ but if it had, the paper would have been twice as long.

While digital payments face the challenge of managing the environmental impact of its ever-increasing numbers of digital transaction, cash is steadily working to be a good citizen.

Last word

Professor Frédéric Fréry from ESCP Business School wrote an article ‘Climate change is a technological challenge’ recently for this magazine. In it he called for technology to be applied to saving the planet and suggested capitalist ecology as a force for good in the sustainability battle. This paper demonstrates an industry living Professor Fréry’s dream.

• A copy of the full report can be found here: https://estore.reconnaissance.net/ cn-cash-roadmap-sustainability/