There has been enough buzz around the PVC problem in the last 10 years that many credit card holders are aware of it, and would prefer a cleaner alternative.

It’s hard to know how many credit cards are really out there, but if every household in the US (~100 million) has 10-20 cards that’s 1-2 billion cards just in the US (yeah, that’s a lot of cards), using 10 million pounds of PVC (about 0.01 lbs/card).

Enter PLA–Polylactide or polylactic acid resin. This stuff has been around a while, and sounds great…made from corn, it’s biodegradable, compostable and renewable so it should be pretty eco-friendly right?

Unfortunately, not really.

There is a down side, at least for the near future. PLA is pretty energy intensive (like corn-based ethanol…don’t get me started), and most of our corn is grown in states whose electricity is coming from coal-fired power plants. Add to that the fact that corn-based products are competing with a food source and it’s reason to pause. Plant-based polymers have to be part of our future, but there’s still work to do.

Another interesting alternative is bio-degradable PVC. While not exactly the plastic of choice for building materials (I’d rather my window frames didn’t disintegrate in 4 years), bio-degradable PVC might work alright in credit cards. Of course, we’d be side-stepping the primary concern of card incineration–biodegradable PVC is just as dioxin prone as non-biodegradable.

So how about just using a more environmentally friendly plastic like PET (water bottles) or HDPE (milk bottles)? Many cards use PET laminates already, and the critical components of the card, like the magnetic stripe, signature panel, graphics, etc. work fine on PET. It ends up one of the big hurdles for PET is the most recognizable and defining element–the embossed account number. PVC is just about perfect for embossing and PET is, well, challenging. Our other alternative HDPE is relatively soft, and just doesn’t make a very appealing card. There is a volume of other plastic resins to choose from, but you quickly start to climb the increasing cost and toxicity slope.

Which leaves us with…PVC. At least for now within the constraints of our investigation. This is not an endorsement of PVC, but rather an acknowledgement of the challenges faced by a deeply embedded industry with a mega-base of installed technology. We’ve got lots of ideas about alternative card formats based on various eco-friendly materials, but not any easy “swap-in” replacements for PVC without tradeoffs.

Material substitution is a logical first step toward sustainability, but our world is filled with highly specialized materials. Some materials have been custom designed to fulfill a specific need, and some industries have been built up over decades based on the specific properties of one material. We can change, but the real solution will require altering industry’s (and our own) status quo.

[Photo: Andres Rueda]