With BEES®, the Banknote Environmental Evaluation Software, Orell Füssli offers a consulting service to Central Banks, assessing a banknote's environmental impact during the design process. As a result, a Central Bank receives a modular estimation of the environmental impact based on the functional design of the banknote.
BEES® simplifies the evaluation of the environmental impact of various design choices during the design stage, without the need for a lengthy and costly Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). BEES® provides a user-friendly graphical interface to select and showcase materials and security features on a banknote, along with their environmental impact. Based on proven and tested data sets, BEES® generates a variety of environmental impact indicators. Variants of banknotes under development can be compared with each other, previous series, or even external LCA results.
The graphic below compares two fictional designs: a simple design on cotton and a complex design on polymer, expressed through three environmental impact indicators—non-renewable energy, renewable energy, and CO2-equivalents.
The environmental impact of the simple cotton design during production is 17% to 46% lower than that of the complex polymer design, depending on the chosen indicator. However, depending on the circulation conditions and the clean note policy, this difference may be equalised or even reversed over time in circulation.
