MasterCard announced that it will abandon the use of native PVC plastic, and all cards will be made of renewable materials from 2028.

CTOnews.com, June 30 (Xinhua)-- MasterCard recently announced that it will phase out native PVC plastic from its physical card making process by 2028.

▲ Picture Source Pexels MasterCard said that from January 1, 2028, all newly manufactured MasterCard plastic cards will be made of renewable materials, including recycled polyvinyl chloride (rPVC) and recycled polyethylene (rPE). In addition, the company plans to provide technical support to partners and card issuers to phase out native PVC plastics.

MasterCard launched the Sustainable physical Card Program in 2018 and has launched more than 168 million physical cards made of recycled materials and biomaterials with the help of more than 330 card issuers in 80 countries and regions around the world.

In mid-June, MasterCard launched a global program to recycle credit and debit cards, which will first provide HSBC with card shredders, each of which can hold 10000 cards, the equivalent of 110lb of plastic. Once the card breaker is full, MasterCard will be responsible for transferring the waste cards to plastic recycling facilities.

MasterCard said the project would be piloted for six months and would allow bank customers to recycle any plastic cards, including those from competitors such as VISA.

MasterCard says it currently has about 3.1bn cards in circulation, and the banking industry is estimated to produce about 600m cards a year, each with a useful life of about five years.

A previous report by Nielsen, a research firm, showed that the total number of cards in circulation worldwide was close to 26 billion in 2022 and predicted that the number could increase to 28.4 billion by 2027.