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Old UK banknotes, made of 'paper', had no real durability issue.

I think the key benefit of polymer notes is the opportunity for far more security features. Holograms, Prismatic effects, braille printing, variable transparency, etc.

Also, they're probably cheaper, considering most of Europe uses polymer notes too.

The UK had issues with banknote forgery, so a change over to a new base material makes a good clean cutoff to say "no paper notes are valid anymore", which cuts off forgers too.

The US also has major note forgery issues, but to my knowledge they have never taken serious action against fake notes. If they did, they would probably switch to polymer too.

The United States created the Secret Service in 1865 to combat forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/United_States_Secret_Service

And the currency itself has numerous security features to detect counterfeits: https://carnation-inc.com/blogs/money-handling-blog/100-bill...

For a 100$ bill, rest of them, as your article says, is way less advanced.

Cuts off tax dodgers too. I have heard of people that had a lot of problems when the notes changed over because they had tens of thousands of old notes from cash in hand work over the years that hadn't been declared.

Even more pedantically, paper made from cotton and linen is paper by most definitions.

Wood pulp paper is by far the most common these days, but that's surprisingly recent (mid-19th century). Before that it was mostly cotton, linen and hemp.

You can also still buy cotton resume paper, although with how digital things are these days I’m not sure how useful it would be unless you really want that Target job.

Watercolor paper is typically 100% cotton

Usually it is used for PhD theses too except almost all of those are on ProQuest now these days

> that's surprisingly recent

Cellulose in wood is contained in a block of wood, not like the easily accessed strands of cellulose in cotton. It's mixed together with lignin and other components in wood. It is possible to make a weak, brittle kind of paper with straight wood pulp that's mashed and cooked and pressed. Mixing in a little sawdust to rag paper is an old practice. But properly freeing the cellulose requires both extensive mechanical shredding and chemical treatments. As far as 19th century technologies goes it's underappreciated. From what I can piece together, around 1800 in England, a labourer's daily wages would buy a few dozen sheets of paper. By 1900, they could buy literally reams and reams of the stuff.

Oh, neat! I was repeating a thing I'd heard, but is apparently misleading.

According to a few sources I've found, paper is the name for anything primarily made of tangled cellulose fibers, which can be harvested from many different plant products. The more restrictive "definition", which I had been alluding to, considers only cellulose fibers derived from wood pulp as "true" paper.

Papyrus, the ancient Egyptian writing surface, is not considered paper because the raw material is not processed to remove most non-cellulose contents. Other non-paper writing surfaces throughout history include: vellum/parchment (made from prepared animal skins), clay, animal bones, bamboo and wooden slips, silk, leaves, bark, and I'm sure dozens of others.

I found this wikipedia page to be a good jumping off point for this knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_material

They say “paper” but it was a cotton blend much like USD. They’re shit talking old notes because it’s good for business. I haven’t touched cash in a while but I don’t recall any meaningful difference in the durability of “paper” GBP and USD.

Edit: the additional context for this article is at the time the notes were released, there was a lot of anger when people discovered the notes contained animal products.

There's £2Bn worth of fivers in circulation. A note weighs 0.7grams and contains less than 0.05% tallow. That means that between one and three cows supplied the tallow necessary to produce the entire monetary supply of the country.

This anger seems somewhat misguided considering the number of animals that are butchered for food in the UK every day.

unless your a hindu.

This being the UK, sheep is more likely ?

The polymer ones always look pristine, which is nice, and they're fairly difficult to tear.. however as soon as you do manage to get a nick in them, they tear right the way across almost immediately.

I suspect most notes end up being replaced mainly because they get tatty rather than being torn, though, and I would bet a high denomination that by that metric, polymer notes last far longer.

Polymer notes would be yet another vector for plastics in our bodies and environment though. Especially for store clerks who already get a measurable amount of exposure from plastic receipts.

> In my wallet I currently have a couple hundred in US currency from years 2003 to 2014

Confusingly enough the year on US Bank Notes is not when they were printed. For example, the current series is "2017A", which started being printed in 2019.

> US currency is made of a cotton-linen blend, so (pedantically) it is not paper

Perhaps it isn't paper in the US but rag paper is quite definitely paper in the UK.

Rag paper is paper in the US, too.

> "it would take 4000 double folds, forwards and backwards, to tear a banknote". Is this insufficient for UK uses?

When I was in the US I've often was given heavy worn out banknotes sometimes with tears. Haven't seen so many badly damaged pounds so may be dollars can benefit from more durable material too.

The issue is that the one-dollar bill is still being printed. Decades of inflation has made dollar bills much more common, which means they come out of pockets more, which means they wear faster. I expect once the penny finally goes out of use, dollar bills will as well, and you'll see a lot more dollar coins.

I feel like the US would just switch to more durable polymer bills than try the dollar coin thing again. I only ever get them in vending machines. They are much heavier than a bill so transport costs are higher and many people don't like carrying coins around anyway. Plus, at the point where a dollar bill costs too much to produce, we'd be in a near cashless society so small denominations wouldn't make much sense.

US notes also have iron in them, and will bend towards a very strong magnet.