[BITList] Plastic Bank Notes

[Michael Feltham]

From the BBC Money programme

Mike
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There's a lot of serious stuff in the programme so here's a bit of trivia. Clydesdale Bank is to steal a march (literally) on the Bank of England by producing Britain's first plastic banknote next spring. The note will feature Sir William Arrol whose firm built the famous Forth Bridge in 1890. The new plastic note will be issued to celebrate the bridge's 125th anniversary in, ahem, March 2015. Executive Director of Clydesdale, Debbie Crosbie, said the new, ahem, springier note will be a fitting tribute to the "incredible feat of engineering" that is the Forth Bridge. 

The Clydesdale note will be issued more than a year before the Bank of England issues its first plastic fiver - featuring novelist Jane Austen - in June 2016. She will be followed by the Winston Churchill plastic tenner in 2017. Plastic banknotes last around two and a half times as long as those made of paper and are supposed to be much harder to counterfeit. The Clydesdale note will include Spark Orbital security - described as "a colour shifting ink effect". No. I'm not quite sure what it means either. But you can see an example of it in Banknote News (yes really). 

The first plastic banknote in the UK (as opposed to Britain) was a five-pound note issued by Northern Bank in Northern Ireland in October 1999 to celebrate the millennium. But it was not reissued and is now a collector's item (or maybe not - one sold recently for £5.01 on eBay!). More than 20 other countries have already followed the lead of Australia which pioneered the plastic note in 1988. 

Banks generally prefer to say plastic notes are made of 'polymer' which sounds a bit posher than plastic but in fact plastic is just one type of polymer. Or the other way round. And no-one wants them to be confused with, yuk, the plastic PVC that credit and debit cards are made of!
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