Monitoring the Life Cycle Impact of the Dutch Cash Cycle

In the past, DNB published a cradle-to-grave Life Cycle Assessment of the retail payments system in the Netherlands over the year 2015 (Lindgreen et al., Int. J. Life Cycle Assess. 2018; Hanegraaf et al., Int. J. Life Cycle Assess. 2020). In this presentation, we will correct some of the results in these papers. We show that the actual environmental impact for cash payments is around five times higher than the impact of card payments in 2015. Based on the corrected calculations, we make projections of the carbon footprint of the Dutch cash cycle to more recent years. Furthermore, we made a rough estimate on what the carbon footprint, at a minimum, has been in the year 1990, being the reference year for the Paris Agreement. We can conclude that we reached the Paris 2030 goal of a 50% reduction in carbon emissions already in 2019. We have evolved the methodology into a carbon footprint monitoring system, which highlights progress in emissions reduction. Based on this monitoring system, and given recent alternatives in energy sources, the current carbon footprint of cash payments can be potentially reduced to a size comparable to the carbon footprint of card payments.