A payment card only weighs five grams, not much, but the mass makes it: Every year, six billion new bank and payment cards are issued worldwide, according to a recent study. That corresponds to the weight of 150 Boeing 747s. And of course, the cards are usually made of plastic. Is that sustainable? Not really, several banks in Germany now thought. Deutsche Bank, for example, now only uses payment cards made from recycled plastic the money house announced in June. The production of the cards will be switched to recycled material from mid-2023. The Ökobank GLS and now also the Volksbanken are a step further, after all the number two on the German banking market after the savings banks.
A new subsidiary of the cooperative banks wants according to the Handelsblatt are now even launching a more or less compostable payment card and selling it worldwide – made of wood. The first Volksbanks are already issuing such cards. “Our new wooden card is here,” announced Volksbank Haselünne from Lower Saxony on the LinkedIn careers network. All members whose cards expired at the end of 2022 were already equipped with it, and each of our new members will receive the new contactless Girocard “exclusively” “in the new and sustainable wooden edition”. It consists of 90 percent wood (maple from FSC-certified cultivation in Switzerland and Germany) and ten percent paper and biodegradable glue. Of course, it also has a chip, antenna and magnetic stripe.
It would actually be even better if you didn’t use a card at all
What’s more, around 15 other cooperative banks want to test the whole thing over the next few months, according to the cooperative service provider DG Nexolution. This equips the more than 700 cooperative banks in Germany with Girocards and credit cards. It should start with 50,000 wooden cards this year. From 2024 onwards, the provider wants to deliver one to several million cards per year. According to Christian Lehringer, head of the responsible subsidiary Copecto, the wooden card is “great proof that everyday objects can be made from sustainable materials that nobody would have thought possible until recently”. The GLS Bank – with around 250,000 private checking accounts, the largest sustainability bank in Germany – now even wants to switch to it entirely. So that the wooden cards are stable, they are made of several layers of veneer, a few millimeters thick wood. A layer of paper is also incorporated. The adhesive used is biodegradable. But of course it’s not the chip card.
However, the question remains as to how much this actually brings and whether banks do not have much more influence if they limit lending to environmental sinners. An international team of researchers has just examined the submissions of around 500 European credit institutions and compared them with the transactions. The result was that banks that brag the most about their environmental conscience tend to lend to companies that one would probably describe as “environmental pigs”. The Study titled “Glossy Green Banks” was even a topic at a conference of the European Central Bank. The Deutsche Bank, for example, advertises with a recyclable money card, financed according to the Non-governmental organization Facing Finance but further “large-scale plastics companies”.
Wouldn’t it be better if there were no more bank cards at all? “Absolutely,” says Joerg Schwitalla, an expert on payment systems: “The biggest carbon footprint of a payment card is probably the chip and not the plastic.” The most environmentally friendly card is therefore the digital card, i.e. paying with a smartphone. “I have practically zero CO₂ there,” says Schwitalla. The credit industry is already well on the way to making digital cards the standard. The wooden card, it would then be a kind of bridging technology.