14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this year, in September, the Bank of England announced that it was looking into the possibility of replacing the cotton paper money in circulation in the United Kingdom with polymer banknotes.
It turns out that the Bank has finally made its decision, and that the country's paper currency will soon become a thing of the past.
Thus, just yesterday, the Bank of England issued a press release saying that, come 2016, it would start replacing the cotton paper money now in use across the United Kingdom with polymer banknotes.
As detailed in the press release, the first polymer banknotes that the Bank will issue will be ₤5 ones. About a year later, ₤10 polymer banknotes will also be rolled out.
“The new polymer notes will retain the familiar look of Bank of England banknotes, including the portrait of Her Majesty the Queen and a historical character,” the Bank writes in its press release.
“The first polymer note will be the £5 note featuring Sir Winston Churchill and will be issued in 2016. It will be followed around a year later by a polymer £10 note featuring Jane Austen,” it adds.
The Bank of England says that, unlike cotton paper money, the polymer banknotes it plans to introduce in the country cause little damage to the environment. Otherwise put, they are eco-friendly.
According to the Bank, this is chiefly due to the fact that they last longer. More precisely, a polymer banknote's lifespan is estimated to be some 2.5 times longer than that of cotton paper currency.
Hence, such banknotes do not have to be replaced all that often, and less resources are used.
What's more, the Bank for England says that, as found by an independent study it commissioned, polymer banknotes have a lower ecological footprint from production to destruction.
“Polymer notes are the next step in the evolution of banknote design to meet that objective. The quality of polymer notes is higher, they are more secure from counterfeiting, and they can be produced at lower cost to the taxpayer and the environment,” Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England explains in a statement.