Mastercard Is Encouraging Us to Shred Our Credit and Debit Cards
Mastercard wants to recycle billions of expired debit and credit cards with a little help from consumers.
Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, today announced a blueprint for card recycling(Opens in a new window) that he hopes can be rolled out worldwide. It consists of installing dedicated collection boxes at bank branches that expired credit and debit cards can be deposited into. The box then shreds the card and once full, the shredded plastic is sent off to be recycled.
To begin with, the collection boxes are rolling out to select branches of HSBC in the UK. Recycling will be carried out by TerraCycle(Opens in a new window), which already deals with a wide range of hard-to-recycle plastic products. Once recycled, the cards become plastic pellets and powders which can be used in the manufacture of new products.
The majority of credit and debit cards are manufactured using polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which requires a special process of removing impurities before it can be recycled. Typically, expired cards are cut up and thrown out as general waste because consumers have had no easy means of recycling them. Mastercard is hoping to put an end to that.
The payment-processing company is also working to manufacture more sustainable cards(Opens in a new window) free of PVC. From Jan. 1, 2028, Mastercard will only produce cards made from sustainable materials including recycled plastic such as rPVC, rPET, or PLA. The magnetic stripe on the back of cards is also set to disappear next year. By introducing an easy way to recycle PVC cards now, Mastercard is also paving the way to have a ready supply of rPVC for its card manufacturing in 2028.
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