The End of the era of Plastic Cards

In the evening of that same day, he got back home and spoke to his wife, who was ironing. She suggested that Forrest weld the stripe into the plastic card with the use of an iron. Forrest made some trials to prove the method right.

The heated iron melted the upper layer of the plastic card. The adhesion between the plastic and the stripe was able to ensure bonding of these two materials.

This eventually led to the popularity of cards with a magnetic stripe, which consequently started to be used for payments, loyalty programs, and access control.

A plastic card is first and foremost an identification means to all of these operations. The second factor for authentication here would be the personal information number or password.

Magnetic stripes are inherently unsafe, however — it is easy to copy the data with a magnetic card reader. Criminals could easily skim cards and utilize additional methods to capture PINs and passwords. To ensure safety against criminals, plastic cards with a magnetic stripe were substituted by smart cards with a chip. 3D Secure and two-factor authentication were later introduced online.

The need to improve authentication, identification, and payment systems has initially been influenced by a massive use of the internet (both wired and wireless) and later the appearance of the internet-of-things, which deals with specialized connected equipment.

With the increasing usage of mobile devices, the demand for security-related solutions are also rocketing, which leads to the call for improving technology on authentication, identification and payment systems. However, the current method of security enhancement seems to come with a heavy burden to the environment. The more updates we are implementing to these plastic cards, the more impact they are causing to us financially and environmentally.

Banks spend millions of dollars to issue plastic cards featuring new technologies such as RFID chips and Motion Code. Yet, every three-four years the expired plastic cards shall be trashed, polluting, thus, our planet and causing negative effects both on flora and fauna. In 2017 more than 35 billion plastic cards were produced. Expenses on their emission exceeded $20 billion annually. According to the report of the World Economic Forum 2017, by 2050 the volume of plastic trash present in the world’s oceans may exceed the amount of fish.

How can we keep the balance between enhancing technology and protecting the environment? Is there a better way to do authentication and payments? Is this the end of the era of plastic cards? Just like how desktop PCs were substituted by laptops and mobile devices, plastic cards stuffed in our wallets shall also become a thing of the past, considering the damage they caused to the environment. What are you ready to do about it?

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