Recycling Makes Progress, Sustainability Has a Way to Go

Royal Dutch Kusters Engineering has published its 2025 Banknote Recycling Study. Kusters is one of the banknote industry’s leading manufacturers of high security off-line destruction and shred handling equipment for banknotes and coins; the paper explores how central banks are handling the disposal of unfit notes in particular, and also some of their general sustainability activities, based on an extensive market survey.

Recycling is made harder for the banknotes because volumes are relatively low compared with other waste sources, and sorting is often decentralised. Recycling usually requires the local waste industry to have reached a certain level of maturity, which is even more important given the wide range of substrates, inks and security features used on notes, but therefore also quite challenging.

While destruction can be, of course, off- or on-line, and the shreds can be briquetted or loose, at the heart of any recycling plan is the need to separate different materials – cotton, polymer, composite substrates.