> [Maxim](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again) / [Apakabar Cash: Money of the World](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again/apakabar.cash) / Polymer banknotes # Polymer banknotes **Contents:** - [Australian origins](#australian-origins) - [The 1988 bicentennial $10](#the-1988-bicentennial-10) - [Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of Australia](#yumbulul-v-reserve-bank-of-australia) - [Tyvek banknotes (early 1980s)](#tyvek-banknotes-early-1980s) - [Global adoption](#global-adoption) - [Technology and manufacture](#technology-and-manufacture) - [Hold-outs](#hold-outs) A polymer banknote is a piece of currency printed on a sheet of plastic (specifically biaxially-oriented polypropylene, BOPP) rather than cotton paper. The technology was invented in Australia in the 1980s and has since spread to about fifty countries; the global market in polymer substrate is dominated by a single producer, the Australian-Canadian firm CCL Secure. ## Australian origins The story begins in 1966, the year Australia switched from pounds to dollars. Within twelve months of the new decimal series entering circulation, large numbers of forged $10 notes appeared in shops, made well enough to pass at the counter. The Reserve Bank of Australia decided that the answer was not better paper, but a completely different substrate. In 1968 the RBA commissioned the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Melbourne to find one. Led by the chemist David Solomon, the project spent twenty years refining a transparent polymer film that could be printed with conventional inks, embossed with optically variable devices, and trusted to last in wallets. ## The 1988 bicentennial $10 The result was issued on 26 January 1988, the bicentenary of Governor Phillip's naming of Sydney Cove. The world's first polymer banknote was an A$10 commemorative, with HMS *Supply* and figures of European settlement on the obverse and an Aboriginal youth bearing the Galpu clan's Morning Star pole on the reverse. A clear plastic window contained a holographic portrait of Captain James Cook. ![Obverse of the 1988 Australian $10 polymer commemorative banknote, with HMS Supply and the settlement scene](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/b25ec97179a3968c.jpg) ![Reverse of the 1988 Australian $10 polymer commemorative banknote, with the Morning Star pole](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/9e95bcad6015bc34.jpg) By 1996 Australia had become the first country in the world to convert its entire banknote series to polymer. ### Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of Australia The design provoked an Indigenous-rights copyright case. Terry Yumbulul, the Galpu artist who had carved the original Morning Star pole now reproduced as the reverse design, had signed a licence with the Reserve Bank's agent without fully understanding that his clan considered the pole a sacred ritual object that could not be commercialised. He sued the RBA in 1991. Justice Robert French held that the licence was valid but added that "Australia's copyright law does not provide adequate recognition of Aboriginal community claims to regulate the reproduction and use of works which are essentially communal in origin." The Bank settled out of court. ## Tyvek banknotes (early 1980s) Australia was not the first country to issue plastic notes, only the first to make them work. In the early 1980s, the American chemical company DuPont licensed its synthetic-fibre product Tyvek as a banknote substrate in Haiti, Costa Rica and the Isle of Man. The notes smudged ink and tore at the corners; production was discontinued within a few years. ## Global adoption After Australia, the technology spread denomination by denomination, country by country. In 1999 Romania became the first European country (and the first in the Northern Hemisphere) to issue a polymer note: a 2,000-lei commemorative for the total solar eclipse of 11 August that year. By 2003 it had switched its entire series. New Zealand made the same jump on a single day, 3 May 1999, replacing six paper denominations at once. [Vietnam](page:4705) rolled out a full polymer suite between 17 December 2003 and 30 August 2006, six denominations from 10,000 to 500,000 đồng, the first complete polymer family in Asia. Canada converted the Canadian dollar between 2011 and 2013. The Bank of England rolled out [pound sterling](page:4175) in polymer between 2016 and 2021: Churchill, Austen, Turner and Turing. About fifty countries now print at least one denomination on polymer. ## Technology and manufacture The substrate is biaxially-oriented polypropylene, a film about eighty micrometres thick. It is opaque white in the centre and clear at the edges, which allows the printer to leave transparent windows for security features. Optically variable devices such as holograms, microprinting and colour-shifting ink are baked into the substrate during printing. Almost every polymer note in the world today sits on Guardian Polymer, originally manufactured by Securency International, a joint venture of the Reserve Bank of Australia and Innovia Films. Innovia later bought out the RBA's stake; the Canadian giant CCL Industries acquired Innovia in 2017 and rebranded the operation CCL Secure. Over eighty billion banknotes have been printed on Guardian substrate. Polymer notes survive an accidental wash and last 2.5 to four times longer than cotton paper, depending on which central bank you ask. They are also recyclable: ground-up Guardian substrate has been turned into garden compost bins, plumbing fittings and (on at least one occasion) building bricks. ## Hold-outs Some major economies continue to resist polymer. The United States Federal Reserve still prints on the cotton-linen paper supplied since 1879 by Crane Currency of Dalton, Massachusetts; the cotton-paper lobby is durable and the technical advantages have so far been judged insufficient. The eurozone, Japan, India and China remain on paper as well.