Wooden Cards: A Sustainable Solution for Banks’ Card Issuance

Banks have long been thinking about a more sustainable solution for issuing Girocards, credit and debit cards. Deutsche Bank, for example, has been using recycled plastic as card material for several months, other banks and fintechs such as Tomorrow, which is particularly sustainable, are using (apparently somewhat more expensive) solutions made of sustainable cherry wood veneer, at least in the luxury segment of the zero account model.

In the autumn of last year, the GLS-Bank, which (itself belongs to the Genobankenwelt) has also taken up the cause of social-ecological banking, began to rely on cards made of wood veneer. The card, which is said to do without a plastic core, but of course also has to use the environmentally harmful components antenna, chip and magnetic stripe in order to comply with the rules, was initially implemented in a small edition with a service provider and is now apparently so established that other Banks from the cooperative camp want to bet on it.

After all, the new sustainable cards, which come from the supplier DG Nexolution, are made of 90 percent wood (FSC-certified maple from Switzerland and Germany) and ten percent paper and biodegradable glue. In the future, however, other domestic types of wood such as cherry wood will also be used.

The veneer should make the card so resistant that it can compete with the old plastic version in terms of stability and functionality. This has to be the case, because it would be annoying for customers if the card did not last the usual years of use or if banks had to exchange it prematurely due to functional problems.

But the tests with the sustainability-oriented and therefore certainly tolerant customers of the GLS Bank apparently worked well. Because in the last few weeks, more and more of the approximately 700 regional banks have announced wooden cards that are to be issued in the future. Around 27 million money cards (mostly Girocards, recently after the Maestro end with co-badge Visa Debit for use abroad, but also a small proportion of credit cards) are in circulation here.

About a quarter – plus new customers and the issue of alternative cards – are changed from year to year. Initially, however, only around 50,000 cards are to be issued from wood this year, after all a number of “several million” in the coming year.

Is all of this good news or just a form of greenwashing? If you apply strict ESG and sustainability criteria, it quickly becomes clear that the cards, which weigh around five grams, are a problem in themselves, but the built-in technology consisting of chip, antenna and magnetic stripe is the crucial point. And that is still needed. However, it would be much more helpful in terms of sustainability if banks would dispense with chips and antennas that use high-quality raw materials and metals that are environmentally harmful to manufacture. That would reduce the carbon footprint more significantly than the question of whether to use plastic or wood (plus glue).

That would certainly be possible in the medium term, but would at least require an EU-wide switch to digital and virtual cards on smartphones via the NFC function. There are already plenty of smartphones, smartwatches, rings and other devices that can be used multiple times, but as is so often the case, the devil is in the details. After all, what is the point if some banks already allow you to withdraw money by hanging up your smartphone, but access control outside of business hours requires the insertion of a bank card?

An industry that really wants to be sustainable should be able to find suitable solutions for this in the medium term. Because the wooden card is a step in the right direction, but it remains a bridging technology on the way to completely digital solutions.

But there is also the human factor: not every customer is really digitally affine. Card payment and use is often unwelcome. And even if you offer a reasonable app solution, such as with the Deutschland-Ticket, many customers still prefer to keep the plastic card in their wallet.

In this respect, it will also be important that companies manage to initiate a rethink here, because an increasing proportion of customers have suitable mobile devices and usually always have their smartphone with them anyway. To dismiss the advance of the cooperative banks as pure greenwashing would be of little use in this respect.