It's All About The Polymers

beloved listeners. Correct, yes, this is listener Matt via Twitter, I who said to us, in time for Australia Day on Sunday, how about a podcast for Australia's polymer money. And you know what Australia Day was several Sundays ago. Yes, this is This is not an up to date and current podcast, so we apologize for not managing to put it out before the day. We're just really early for next year, is the thing. Yeah, see here's the thing. Uh, time happens earlier in Australia than it does over here.

And that's the reason. I don't think that's the reason let's just I'm trying to cover our tracks here, okay. So yeah, we wanted to talk about polymer currency. What is it? Uh? And why is it important? Why are so many other places looking into it or have already adopted it at least in some measure? Yeah, because Australia was that the first country to adopt an entire line of polymer notes to completely switch over their paper currency

to polymer currency. And that was back in six although they had started using polymer notes way back, and other countries had had experimented with it before, but no country had switched completely over to polymer currency before Australia did it, right, And now more than twenty five other nations are are issuing some polymer notes and and more adding themselves to

the list all the time. The UK, for example, has plans to introduce both a five pound Winston Churchhill note and a ten pound Jane Austin notes starting in seen respectively. That's pretty cool. And so yeah, we're looking at upwards of a billion of these entering circulation, right, I mean in three years in the UK alone, right, Yeah, it's

it's a pretty big rollout. They're going to be withdrawing all of their paper notes for those two current those two denominations, right right, So that makes makes us wonder like, what's the big deal here. So we're gonna set some some foundation before we get into all the stuff about polymers, because you know, it helps to actually understand bank notes in general, currency in general before we jump into that. So a bank note is just a unit of current currency.

Most of you out there probably very familiar with some sort of banknote. Here in the United States, we talk about dollar bills, five dollar bills, to and dollar bills, that kind of thing. As you were saying, in the UK, it's the pound, you know, in a lot of European A sations it's the eu O that sort of stuff. Well, it's this is the These are the actual physical bills that represent certain amounts of value. It represents a specific

amount of value for a given nation exactly. So, h a five dollar bill in the United States represents five dollars, pretty straightforward when you get down to it, which is nice because as you've listen to this podcast, you know some of the topics we cover not so straightforward. Right. Also, I'd like to apologize on behalf of myself for for amount of value. That was just a really spectacular phrasing. Oh I get so redundantly repetitive that I have to

reiterate it occasionally. So at any rate, we want to talk also about what a polymer is. Now, a polymer is a type of molecule. It's does not necessarily mean natural versus synthetic. That there are actually both natural polymers and synthetic polymers out there. This is a specific classification of molecules. Now, a polymer is made up of monomers. Not a big surprise there. Polymer means poly means many, right,

and mono means one. So a monomer is kind of like the base unit of a polymer, which you end up being these long chains of of molecules. They tend to be pretty resilient and flexible, at least on the molecular level, depending upon uh, what they're made out of. When you get it onto the macro scale, they may be more or less flexible than other materials. But if you're looking at natural polymers, that includes stuff like silk or amber, and synthetic polymers include man made rubber. Natural

rubber also a polymer, obviously not a synthetic one. That's the word natural um, but another synthetic polymer would be plastics. So, uh, these have turned out to be incredibly useful materials for all sorts of industries. Uh, the technology industry in particular. I mean, our electronics wouldn't be what they are without

these kind of plastic polymers, right. Plastics make it possible, yeah, because I mean otherwise we'd have to find some other material to make everything out of and it would be all the prices would go up. Plastics cheap, it's easy to produce. So these are all really important elements that you want in any kind of material. And so some people started thinking, well, maybe we could apply that to currency. So if you look at we talked about what a bank note does, we talked about what a polymer is.

So a polymer bank note is a banknote, mayor of pombers Hey, and we can end the podcast right here. Well we'll keep going though, because you know me, I can't stop it, just like whatever. It is like three and a half minutes. So we're looking at these type of synthetic materials, mainly the plastics family, that to be

used as a bank note. Uh, using plastic. According to all the authorities who are issuing these polymer currency uh denominations, it's actually cheaper than using paper in the long run. I mean, you know, of course, the costs of setting up a program to create these things, it's going to be pretty expensive term, but once once you get it going, it should be cheaper per bill to create these things, right, And the idea behind that is you know, you might say, well,

how is it cheaper per bill? And the thought is that, well, these things are durable, they last longer than paper currency, and paper currency you have to continuously replace. So you may not be aware of this, but if you have a paper bill and you use it, you actually go out and you buy something with it, and someone else goes out and buy something with it, and eventually those

bills make their ways to banks. And what happens is that when a bank gets bills, they look at the bills, and if the bills have reached a certain level of use, if they're if they're basically about to disintegrate or otherwise become um unusable or um you probably don't want to touch them. Then super gross, I think, is the right. Those dollar bills or five dollars whatever, those notes get taken out of circulation and replaced with brand new, fresh notes.

So when you hear about things like a you know, a treasury department printing up currency those bills, that doesn't represent new wealth, right, that's not new as and that's not adding wealth to the nation. What that's doing is that's replacing old bills that were in circulation. The way you create wealth is not by printing more money, because it's as many countries have actually found in the past, and and and sometimes people are printing money in order

to increase the wealth. And there were huge quote marks around that phrase in case you couldn't hear them, because that is not that that's called inflation. And that's different exactly exactly. If you end up just printing currency and then dumping it into an economy, you really devalue the currency. So suddenly now everything costs more because the currency isn't worth as much, it doesn't have as much buying power.

So when they're printing up these these these bills, it's really to replace the ones that are already in circulation that need to be replaced. That's the main reason. The way you create wealth, by the way, in case you are wondering, is through loans. You loan out money and

you add interest. That interest represents new wealth. That's kind of how in a very high level, Like all the economics majors out there, just like he is oversimplifying this to the point of ridiculousness, but that's basically how you create new wealth. Economics has never made a lick of sense to me, Like like like nanoparticles, sure totally back for economics, no idea exactly totally, but at any rate.

Um So, these polymer notes, in addition to being slightly less expensive to manufacture and and more durable, so therefore you know able to be kept in circulation longer, have a lot of good benefits when it comes to anti counterfeiting measures. Right, So let's talk about some anti counterfeiting measures.

These are ones that some of them you can find on on paper currency, but it's important to run down the list of it because a lot of the same techniques that are used in paper currency are being used in polymer currency as well. So some of these you're gonna hear and you're gonna think, well, how is that special polymer? Not all of them are. So one of them, uh, and it's pretty simple. One is just the idea of creating things that are really finely detailed, like really really

time elements and parts of the image. Um. I mean, that's that's why you'll see a lot of very fine line work in many of the images. It's not just like a big cartoony looking thing, right, And they'll be like little curly cues and swirls and stuff and the various designs that are on the bill. And the idea here is that if you make those those details really precise,

it's difficult to copy that, right. It's difficult for a counterfeiter to make a fake bill that has that same level of detail in it, especially if you were let's say that you have a copy machine that doesn't have any sort of protection on it where you're able to make copies of stuff. The more fine detail you include on there, the harder it is for that copy machine

to reproduce it accurately. And so the hope for people who are making the bills is that anyone who accepts the bill will look at it and be able to tell just by glancing at it whether or not those fine details match up against the real thing or if

it's you think okay. But even even fine detail can be duplicated I mean, I mean, I'm sure that some of you are thinking, like, well, we I have like a really high res scanner, and that could clearly duplicate and and you know, if I have a good enough printer, then I could absolutely make a copy of that thing. But there's, um, there's a specific ink line process. Yeah, so intaglio printing, right, yes, it gets all. When I read Intaglio, I think like that sounds like a cologne

to me or something Intaglio. So what this is is that you, all, right, you take like a roller, okay, the roller is essentially like a stamp, okay, and you make fine etchings in the rollers, so these are little indentations inside the roller. You then coat the roller with ink. Now more inc is going to go into those indentations, because they're like little wells. And then you wipe the ink off the roller, which does not surface exactly, just

into the etchings exactly. And then you can put a piece of paper or whatever whatever you're printing on, and well then just those little fine details that have been etched into the roller will be transferred to whatever you're printing on. And that's a way of creating this incredibly finely detailed work so that you do it accurately over

and over every single time. It's going to come out exactly the way you want it to because it's etched into whatever the printing mechanism is right, and it will also create a design that is raised up off of the paper very slightly paper whatever other Yeah, exactly. So again, both of those things are indications that you've got the real legit currency in your hands. But there are a lot of other anti counterfeiting measures as well, including things

like um multicolor bills. So the idea here is that you don't use just a single dye in the dying of your currency, so that you have maybe a gradation or a couple of different colors on each bill, because that is also difficult to replicate. So if you know, I remember when I think it was, I guess it was the hundred dollar bill of several years ago. Now when it when it was redone, it had kind of

a peach coloring to it besides the green. Yeah, yeah, like a pinkish, peach ish and and everyone's immediate reaction was this looks like monopoly money. But it was actually a very clever way of cheaply integrating better security exactly. So yeah, for a lot of us were suddenly thinking like, why why do we have play money? It's sort of the arrogant American approach to whenever we go to a

foreign country. You know, it's not that every American does this, but I'm sure anyone living in another country has had the experience or at least has heard a story of American tourists calling calling American currency quote unquote real money and then referring to whatever the local currency has as this stuff that I have to use to buy things. On behalf of all Americans, I would like to extend an apology to you. Not all of us are like that. Uh No, some of us are much more subtly completely

ignorant about your money. I I still feel a little bit bad I had the last time I was over in England. I had this really ilarious experience with the shopkeeper where I just I felt like Arthur Weasley holding this pile of British coins and and like she was just trying to she She was like, you know, that will be a pound five, and I was like, how does it? I just held my hands out to her,

like how you you take? How much money? It? Is the really sad part about that story, Lauren, is you're not old enough to have been around back when the when the English currency system was not based off of base ten, when it was like, all right, I'm sorry, it's sixteen pennies to a furlong, which is uh, that's fourteen furlongs to a half guinea crown thing. Obviously, my

ignorance of the English monetary system is also great. But yes, at any rate, I have also had that same experience, so that those multicolor bills obviously another step towards creating an anti counterfeiting strategy, but it's not the only one. Again, there's also incorporating strips of different colored material within a bank note itself. Right, So in this case you might have a comp completely different material than what makes up

the bulk of the bank note. The bank note itself may be made out of some sort of paper slash cloth type stuff, with these other strips incorporated into them. Again, very difficult to counterfeit, you know, there's just really it's just about raising the difficulty so that your average person

can't really counterfeit this money. Uh. It doesn't mean that it's impossible, It just means that you've raised the difficulty so much that the people who are attempting it, that number gets smaller and smaller because it's hard to do. Another strategy is to use holy grams. Yeah. So holograms are obviously these little bit pictures that can uh, they have a different you know, they shine in a different way when you shine light on You also get kind

of a three D effect on them. You know, it looks like you're looking at a three dimensional picture as opposed to just a flat image. And these are of course created with my favorite technology of all time, lasers. Yes, we did an entire suite of episode about holograms over and Forward Thinking a few months back. I failed to look up when exactly that occurred, but but go to the forward thinking website yeah dot com. Please do I

mean the the episodes we did on holograms. We actually explain how people make holograms and it does involve using two different types of lasers in order to complete this. You know, it's actually kind of crazy to think how complicated is just to make a what what appears to be a simple image. But at any rate, again, holograms, it requires you to have some equipment that your average counterfeiter probably doesn't have access to like really expensive lasers.

So then we've got including strips of phosphorescent material. So then you've got you know, if you shine it underneath like a black light and ultra violet light, then you might see that it glows if it's a true bill. Obviously, if that where a counterfeit and it doesn't glow, you'd say, huh, nice try now I'm calling the cops. Right. There's also all kinds of different inks that you can use that

are slightly harder to duplicate. Yes, yeah, including ink that will change color depending upon the angle at which light hits that ink. Right. This is due to a process called uh iridescence. It's a physical process which works by virtue of microstructures, which are basically tiny holes that reflect light at different angles and wavelengths than the rest of

the surrounding material. Yeah, this actually reminds me a lot of how uh glasses free three D works, and that you have these little tiny elements inside a screen that direct light in specific ways so that one eye gets one set of light and the other eye gets the other set of light, and that's what creates the three D effect kind of similar here, except instead of trying to direct light at your at each eye independently, it's just changing that angle so that you get a different

color experience as you're as you're moving the bill in relation to wherever the light sources. Uh. Sure, it can even be used to create this multicolor look without any ink at all. It can be a purely physical structure, yep, yep. Uh. Then there's also using ultraviolet reactive fluorescen inks are metallic inks. Uh, again stuff that's not easy to come by, so again cutting down the likelihood of counterfeiting. Uh. There's also micro printing that's kind of similar to the etching we talked

about before. It's this is where you're printing really really super tiny words or numbers as a way of again foiling the efforts of people to copy an image directly, all right, because not everyone has access to that kind of high definition printing. And then there's also designing software that actually recognizes when you are trying to manipulate some

sort of banknote. Now, this software could be anything from a scanner to a copier to any kind of photoshops sort of material, where once it recognizes the elements of a banknote essentially refuses to help you out. You'll end up getting either an error or if you're trying to copy something, you might just get a solid block where there's no definition at all. It's it's you know, kind of uh, you know, it's another level of security that's

outside the bill itself. This is more on the end of the people who are making the software and hardware al right, right, you would have to depend upon those developers to create that for you, to create it in conjunction with you. And a big example of this is your ryon constellation. So this can recognize a scan bank note based on the patterns that are actually on these banknotes themselves. These have been put there by the various

industries that create the bank notes. If those marks are present on any kind of image, like even if you included those marks on some other form of image, this thing is gonna pick it up and say, all right, I can't work with this, and uh, it's not likely that you're going to have these specifically put on another image because they're tiny. They look like little one millimeter sized circles, and they're usually printed in yellow ink, so you're probably not going to find it on anything else

by accident. It's probably not. It's it's not like it's working off a facial recognition of Jeffer Center something exactly. That would be a poor that. Yeah, that would not work out so well. So then there's also just using a material that's not just paper, right, because paper is not very sturdy and it's also really easy to reproduce. So most countries, including the United States, use some other material.

It's something that's closer to cloth than it is in paper. Linen, in fact, is one of the most popular additives yep. And in the United States it's a mixture cotton and linen fibers, so it's not really paper in the way we normally think of paper, which is why a bill can survive. I run through the washing machine, yep. Yeah, if you want to do some money laundering. Sorry, I didn't really like that joke either, but I'm gonna keep

it anyway. Also, the United States government says that it takes four thousand double folds, as in you're you're folding it forward and backward against itself before a bill will tear. You know, brand new bill will tear. And also because of this mixture, that's also difficult to replicate. However, Uh, that doesn't mean people don't try. So what do you

do to try and detect a counterfeit bill? One of the popular methods that is, Uh, I've seen it used, like I've I've paid for something with like a fresh twenty dollar bill and seeing people use these things these counterfeiting pins. The pen is meant to try and detect the counterfeit bill. It usually has some sort of chemical in it, like iodine, and that would react to starch.

And if it reacts to starch, then will it'll actually stain whatever it is it's marking against start of course being a common ingredient in many papers, but something that US currency does not contain. Right, So the idea would be if you mark if you use this marker on

a legitimate bill, there should be no stain. If used it on something that had a paper that had starch in it, it would stain, which sounds like it be pretty effective, except for the fact that there are a lot of ways of removing starches from paper or actually just buying starch free paper, and in either case those pens would not be effective. So you could have a

fake bill. In fact, you could just cut out a sheet of paper on starch free paper and just write this is money on it and handed to someone and if they ran the little marker on it, there would be no stain. It clearly would not be a real bill, right right, unless you're using a doctor Who's psychic paper, not doctor who. That's terrible the doctor right. Oh, I feel like a bad nerd. It's Mr Who. No, I'm sorry, Yeah, I do all the time at any rate. If you if you want to hear a little bit more about

all of these anti counterfeiting measures. Jonathan and Christen episode called the Tech of Making Money way back on August nine, and they go into coins as well, if you're curious about how all of this currency is created. Yeah, I remember we talked about milling. You know, was shortly after they invented money, so it was a pretty fresh podcast back then. I was not even born yet. Yeah, I mean, all you know it was it was It was odd because we had no way of recording podcast. It was

just us talking in a room. But somehow someone just wrote it all down and managed to recreate it. But despite all those measures, there are times when counterfeit as still find ways to pass fake bills into circulation, and so that is why are one of the big reasons why countries are starting to switch over to this polymer currency, which has not only all the benefits of the counterfeiting anti counterfeiting measures we just talked about, but has more

on top of them. But before we get into that, let's take a quick break, all right, So let's talk about actual polymer currency. What makes it so special other than the fact that it's made out of plastic. Well, in order to talk about this, let's talk about exactly how this currency is made out of plastics. Oh, you know, that's a good idea, all right. So you get a polymer substrate, which is really just a fancy way of saying a whole big flat sheet of this this stuff.

It's transparent, so you've got, you know, just imagine a big transparent amount of plastic. It essentially looks the way that any transparent part on a bank note would look. Uh. And at this point you can then treat it chemically. You would probably use some form of white ish ink to make it opaque. You might treat certain areas of that substrate chemically so that the white ink does not

adhere to it. That would mean that those sections would remain transparent, which is one of the coolest things I think about polymer currency when you can hold up the bill and see cleanly through it, not because there's a hole in it, which is the way most of my money looks, or because of a water mark. I mean some paper currency does include a water mark, which is a thinner bit of the paper that light can shine through more readily. Yeah, that would be kind of translucent.

You can actually have fully transparent sections of a polymer bank note. So uh, you would then treat it with this chemical, you wash all that off, and you would end up with a mostly opaque, big old sheet of this stuff. Then you would cut it into the actual sheet sizes you would use to feed through the printing.

You would then run it through a printer that would end up applying some of the same techniques we talked about in the previous section, including intaglio etching and all that kind of good stuff in different kinds of banks exactly, And then you end up with these sheets of polymer bank notes, which you of course obviously have to cut up into the right sizes. I mean, you could hand somebody just a full sheet of you know, twenty dollar bank notes and they'd probably be like, this is awesome,

where are the scissors? But you know, you typically would cut those up so they'd be easier to distribute. That sounds like several board game experiences I've had, um, but you can, uh, they do furthermore, protect the sheets with a with a varnish to keep the ink in play. That's true, and that's really important because, as we'll talk about, the ink on these polymer bank notes was an early challenge, uh in the for for countries that were attempting to

make this move earlier than others. Right in the early a bunch of different places, We're looking into the technology, right and uh, what what the you know, you had all these different government officials that we're looking at the possibility of using a polymer to switch over to as the basis for their their actual physical currency. And they started looking around at the different products that were available in the market. No one was actually building a polymer

out from the ground up for this. They were trying to see what else was available. DuPont had a product called taivek, the generic name for that being polyethylene yep. And this was you know, this looks like it could be a potential candidate for polymer currency, so it's used in lots of other stuff too. It's not just for polymer currency. It wasn't developed specifically to be polymer currency.

Was just one of the use cases for it. And technically Haiti was the first country to issue a polymer bank note, and this was way back in nineteen eight but the country didn't stick with polymer currency and in fact would switch back to paper because inc did not stick to the currency. Yeah, there was some smudging issues, which you don't really want in your official, you know, government sanctioned currency, right. There were also problems with the

bills being too fragile. They would break instead of instead of folding. Yeah. So this was again early early on in the experiments with polymer currency, so no one had really hit upon the exact kind of plastic that would be ideal for this use. Uh. Haiti was not the only country to experiment with this early on. Costa Rica also issued a polymer bank note made out of Thai

vek in nineteen eighty three. They also switched back to paper, although they currently used a mixture of both paper and polymer currency, they're just not using the tai Vek polymer anymore. Then you had the Isle of Man, which you know, I keep forgetting is not actually under the governance of the United Kingdom, because I think of the Isle of Man as you know, it's right there there. I mean it might as well be. But but no, no, it's God's own money. And the Isle of Man ended up

using tai Vek. But it wasn't called Taivek. It was rebranded as brad vec because it was being printed by a company called Bradbury Wilkinson. Same stuff, just rebranded, so it still came from DuPont, it wasn't it wasn't made by Bradbury Wilkinson. And it's still polyethylene. It's still polyethylene exactly, same stuff. And that was produced in nine three. And the Isle of Man also abandoned polymer currency after a short while, and they use paper now. The first Australian

polymer notes had had similar problems. The the original, which was a ten dollar by centennial note, was in fact taken out of circulation. So you know, obviously these these early attempts met with let's say, mixed success. It's not that they were it's not that it was a bad idea.

It's just that they hadn't hit upon the right material for it to really work and to for it to truly be a durable physical currency, because if you're going to try and replace your paper currency, you want this stuff to be able to last at least as long as the paper equivalent, if not longer, a right, hopefully longer, so that you're not you're not wasting a whole lot of time and money trying to create this new new

thing only as good as old thing. Australia did kind of lead the way once they worked out what kind of material they wanted to use, and polypropylene is has become the popular choice and it's used in other stuff too. Write it's not just in in uh, polymer currency, right, It's like a textiles that are based on plastic carpets, upholstery, like thermal clothing, ropes. It's it's what all that stuff is made out of. I mean, it's it's also very multifunctional.

It's not just using used in these fibrous kind of applications. It can also be used for lots of medical and lab equipment like peatree dishes or disposable syringes. So this is you know, obviously, again it's one of those things where this has a lot of different utility, and they thought, hey, why don't we make our money out of this stuff except in an Australian accent, which, for your benefit, I

shall not attempt excellent. But you know, this meant that they had a lot of other options that you wouldn't necessarily have with paper currency, including that that I was talking about before, where you turn earned most of the bank note opaque but leave a transparent window. Yeah. Again, this makes it really really hard for counterfeiters to replicate.

You know, you'd have to be very precise in the way you aligned your actual I mean, by the time you go through the whole process of making something that would allow you to design this, you've probably spent more

money than you could possibly replicate, you know. Yeah, yeah, and the touch and feel of this polymer currency is very distinct, so it's a lot more difficult to to get that kind of thing into practice than it would be equivalent paper, right a right, And then uh, you know, they also were able to feature that raised lettering we talked about, like embossing stuff on on this plastic, which actually adheres better to plastic than it would on just

a regular paper bild right, paper can flatten out again

after after circulation. UM you can you can also print designs on top of that transparent window, so you can have little little blocks of of a pake bits inside the window which just layers upon layers, or you could have transparent bits within opaque bits, so you can have an area where you know, in a design there might be shades that are slightly lighter than the surrounding area, and if you hold it up to the light, suddenly you can read stuff like numbers usually and that there

is another great thing to put in there, because again very difficult to replicate. Uh. And as we said earlier in the episode, a lot of the other reasons besides this, this whole um anti counterfeiting approach are things like the fact that this money is more durable. Now, how much more durable is it um depends. It depends on who you ask and exactly what kind of thing they're talking about.

Both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England have said that their their bills are or I mean, in the case of England, are are slated to last about two point five times as long as their paper currency, right. And then you've got the Reserve Bank of Australia. They they they go a little further right, four times as long. I've I've I've read estimates that they're up to ten times as durable. But that doesn't necessary. I mean, all of these are are you know, kind of squiggly precise

estimate numbers. And you can fold this stuff. You know, it's not like it's solid plastic. It's not like a credit card where you know, it's it's stuck in this form factor so that everyone would have to have these very long bill folds. You could actually fold this like you could paper money, yeah, into a standard wallet. Yeah. So uh. Anyway, if you're wondering, hey, how does that stack up against the lifespan of say an average dollar, Well, I'm going to take just a quick tangent here to

to say something that I think is pretty amusing. See here in the United States, we've got several different official organizations that have a lot to do with money, including the Federal Reserve and the U. S. Treasury, and these different agencies give extremely varied accounts of how long the average lifespan is for every denomination of bill. So depends upon whom you ask. I mean, you know, one might say a dollar bill has a two year life expectancy

and that's it. Another would say six years, another would say six months. Does anyone agree on this? Are you talking to each other at all? Yeah? And and so it really depends upon which authority you, uh, you look at.

And it's funny because I actually first found out about that by listening to another podcast called Skeptics Guide to the Universe, where someone had asked them about the average life span of bills um and so one of the members of the podcast group went in to study this, and his response was, this was probably the most frustrating research I've ever had to do, because I kept getting different answers depending upon where I went. I tried to

corroborate it, and I couldn't get any corroboration. So, uh, something that is absolutely definite is that you can clean polymer currency a lot better than you can paper currency. Okay, So here's the thing, y'all. Paper currency passes through a lot of hands. It's pretty yeah, and some of those hands not the nicest hands. You know. It might be people who are sick. It might be that the money itself just comes to contact with other types of contaminants

like bacteria. Oh yeah, I mean I mean people store money and all kinds of non traditional places. It's not all pristine wallets, yep, yep, I've got some some different Like just thinking about the places where I found money, where you know, between cushions of a couch. Who knows how long it's been there. Anyway, The point being that these dollar bills or or bank notes whatever can get pretty grungy and nasty, and you can't really clean them

up without possibly damage. Yeah. So if you're talking about a polymer that's plastic, you can actually use a damp cloth. Just wipe it off, Yeah, just wipe it down, and then you've got a clean bill. So it could actually mean that you end up reducing the chance of spreading things like bacteria around at least a little bit. I mean, it's not like it's going to eliminated entirely, but it

takes away one more potential vector, right certainly. And also just you know, it's it's less stinky than paper linen bills can get. But if you're if you're wondering if I'm overreacting, I'm not a two thousand two report in the Southern Medical Journal showed that pathogens including stephlo caccus are on nine of all dollar bills that they tested. So don't don't put money in your mouth. No, hope,

Please don't, please do not do not do that. We like you, we'd like you to continue being listeners of tech stuff. Now, another argument for polymer bank notes, so we mentioned this earlier too, is that they're actually greener than paper bank notes. And it's not that the processes to create them are greener, because generally, if you can use a renewable resource, that's better than using a a chemically created plastic resources, especially since you're talking about some

sort of probably some fossil fuel involved there. I mean, petroleum based products are often part of this. Sure, although I'm sure that there's there's fossil fuel use and paper money. Sure, But at any rate, um, you know, agencies don't have to create as much of the polymer currency to keep the same amount in circulation because each of the bills

is going to last longer. Yeah, if you look at this from a really big picture standpoint, and you know it's crazy, but you have to step way back to really see the big picture, you're talking not only about replacing fewer bills into circulation, because they're more durable, so they can last longer. They can they can remain in circulation longer. That's one thing, which means you don't have to make as much. That's that's important, but also means

you don't have to transport as much. You know, once you make all those new bills, you have to ship them to the various banks, and that requires energy, it requires you know that, you know, labor. So if you're able to reduce all of that, you can have a measurable effect at the end of the day. This is another example of how something that on the surface seems pretty, you know and dry, once you start diving into it, you realize, wow, everything really is connected. It's way more

complicated than I had first anticipated. So some nations have found that they have more trouble with dealing with polymer currency than they did with paper currency. Nigeria actually considered abandoning polymer bank notes because they said that it was difficult to process and that it was difficult to destroy the old bank notes like once you were taking them

out of circulation. So they're they're so durable that they're running into problems on the opposite end of how to like how do you how do you do how do you break them down? Especially how do you break them down in a way that wouldn't be environmentally dangerous? Now, if you're able to recycle them in some way, like first you have to destroy it. Now, this is true with paper currency too. There are there are various um explanations of how this gets done. But essentially your paper

currency went taking out of circulation is obliterated. I mean it has to be because otherwise if it were to fall back into circulation, then have the danger of inflation. Right, you suddenly have this issue of not being able to control the money supply the currency. Really so, Nigeria said that it was getting really hard to um destroy them properly, and so it was something that was holding them back from fully adopting a polymer currency based economy. Sure Australia

does have a recycling program for their polymer currency. They're they're made into like compost bins and plumbing parts after they're too worn down to be used anymore. Which interesting. I'm there's so many jokes that I want to make about your money going into turning into compost bins or or plumbing, particularly the plumbing pipes. I think about all the money I flushed down the drain over the years,

over one hair brained scheme after another. Those get rich quick schemes, Man, they just never work out for me. I gotta talk to my buddy Zach Morris about that when I'm done anyway. So that's kind of the story on polymer currency. It's actually I think it's really cool stuff. I'm you know, curious to see if the United States

ever kind of moves to that as well. Uh, you know, I think it'd be neat to have this kind of plastic money that has all these other features to it, you know, beyond the ones we're accustomed to with our paper currency. So thank you so much for writing in and asking us to do that, Matt. We really appreciate it. That was a great suggestion. Hey guys, if you have a suggestion for a topic that you think would make a great tech Stuff episode, you need to let us know.

Send us an email. Our address is tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on one of the many social networks that we often are hanging out on, like a Facebook, or Twitter or Tumbler. Our handle is tech Stuff H. S W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it have staff works dot com one