‘Cash: a Roadmap to Sustainability’

With the UN Climate Change conference, COP 26, taking place through early November, we thought it would be appropriate to review the environmental work of stakeholders in the cash industry over the last few years.

We wanted to consider the production and operational activities of coins and banknotes end-to-end from creation to destruction, and to consider cash in the context of wider payments. As importantly, we wanted to share widely what has been done so that others can learn and consider doing it themselves.

Payment context

We ran into some challenges. First, although there are a number of published Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) carried out by central banks, most exclude coins. The most recent LCA published with coin data was the Dutch National Bank’s (DNB) which was from 2018 but using 2015 data.