Canada’s gradual shift to slick, cleaner, synthetic banknotes won’t just mean your money can stand more wear, will not tear and, for the first time, will be recycled into other products instead of destroyed.
The Bank of Canada and the RCMP hope that once the polymer-based notes are in circulation ”“ starting in November with the $100 bill ”“ they’ll also be all but impossible to fake.
Isn’t there a danger of them shattering in the cold Canadian climate?
How will they survive the folding in your wallet? Assuming, of course, that you’ll still have a wallet to carry them in?
Plastic doesn’t automatically mean rigid. After all, your polyester shirts are plastic, too (using “your” generically here, not making comments on anyone’s wardrobe in particular!).
Gold and silver are hard to forge too… just sayin.
No offence taken, Kubla. Most clergy shirts are 65% polyester. And I live in Canada, hence the tongue-in-cheek remark about brittle cash. It always amuses me how fellow Canadians, used to telling our bills apart by their varied colours, complain that they can’t tell US bills apart. How do you do it? they ask. Well, I say, ones have a great big 1 in each corner, fives have a huge 5, etc.
All the comments at the original article about the success of these in Oz-tralia and elsewhere are probably worth noting (no pun intended really). At first when these were introduced (late ’90s?) I felt a bit indignant, like we were being asked to use play money since Monopoly bills are color-coded. But in fact these are very easy to handle, physically as well as visually and I like that, and miss the ease of distinguishing between notes without even looking directly at them when I’m stateside. The part about being difficult to counterfeit is probably something the US government should be taking a look at. If there still were pennies though I would be saving them!
Just occurred to me I conflated two things in my memory in the previous post. The notes were already color-coded but the plastic was introduced after we’d been here a few years. The see-through bit in the center of Oz’s notes is something different but it all works just fine and probably does give counterfeiters a run for their money….sorry, this topic just seems to lend itself to puns 😉
Impossible to counterfeit? I give them about a week…