National Post (National Edition)
There are traces of meat in our banknotes, too
Following a Twitter admission by the Bank of England, nearly two dozen countries — including Canada — learned this week that their polymer banknotes contain trace amounts of animal byproducts.
Specifically, the banknotes contain tiny quantities of tallow, a hard, fatty beef byproduct typically used in the manufacture of soap, candles and industrial lubricants. Tallow can also be made from sheep.
A Bank of Canada spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that all of Canada’s polymer bills contained “literally minute” amounts of tallow.
The ingredient first became publicized thanks to vegan activists in the United Kingdom, where polymer bills were first introduced in September.
In a Monday tweet to concerned British vegan Steffi Rox, the Bank of England confirmed “there is a trace of tallow in the polymer pellets used in the base substrate of the polymer £5 notes.” The term “substrate” refers to the base material of the bills onto which all other features are added.
The polymer in virtually all of the world’s plastic bills is made by a single Australian company, Innovia Security.
Innovia are the makers of Guardian, a substrate used to manufacture the polymer currency of 24 countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico and New Zealand.
In the U.K., an online petition to “remove tallow from banknotes” had garnered 47,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning. The petition has just narrowly pulled ahead of the 44,000 people who signed a petition looking to put David Bowie on a British banknote.
The presence of beef in unsuspected locations is of particular concern for Hindus, who consider cows sacred. Eating beef is also eschewed by many Sikhs, although it is not a religious requirement.
“It’s not something we appreciate,” Vinod Sharma, president of the United Hindu Congress of Canada, told the National Post.