What To Do With Old Credit Cards

What are credit cards made of?

A banking card is usually composed of the following raw materials:

• Several layers of laminated plastic, usually using PVC, alternatively PET  or a bio-sourced material.  
• Inks for printing credit cards with a magnetic stripe. 
• Metal oxide particles with solvents are often the basis for inks.
• There are different types of cards, all using different materials (plastic, plastic substitute, metal, and chips…). 

As a consequence, the way we should dispose of them should be adapted to each component. We can easily imagine the metal within the card shall go to a different recycling stream than the plastics.

The toxic journey of a credit card

What happens to the banking cards after we throw them into the trash bin?

Every year we use 30 million kg PVC for banking card issuance, the equivalence of the weight of about 150 Boeing 747s. 

In most cases, banking cards will either go to the landfill or be thrown into nature. This is the worst-case scenario as it will gradually turn into microplastic and gets back to us.

It will get back to us because we will ingest the particles through the food chain. It's already happening now. In fact, according to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, you are probably swallowing micro plastic equal to the weight of a credit card each week! That's where recycling fits in.

Can plastic credit payment cards be recycled? The answer is YES, but it's not that obvious.

Every banking card is a well-designed compound made up of metals (copper, nickel, gold, aluminum, iron), resin, glass, silicon, and plastics (PVC, PET). This complexity makes recycling payment cards challenging.

How does the recycling process work?

This is what happens in the recycling facility:

Recover plastic and metal: 

• The cards contain plastic (like PVC, PLA, PET): during the separation of materials, plastic and metal are isolated... Recycling metals and plastic and selling them to the second-hand market allows for the recovery of essential resources, which can then be reused in the industry.
• As an alternative, all can be incinerated to recover the energy, meaning the recovered heat can be injected to an industrial installation or to an institution.
• In incineration process, Bio-sourced material such as PLA (Poly Lactic Acid) is a better option than PVC, as it will not generate toxic gas during incineration.

Recycle metals: 

The metal will be sent to manufacturing for a second life: depending on the metal recycling processor, metal will be valued and re-injected into the metal industry. Source