To the woodshed: Demonetised notes recycled to make plywood, stationery and fuel

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is staring at 15,000 million old currency notes currently and it may take the institution a year to destroy them. To be clear, this number is just an estimate; it’s assuming RBI receives even 70 percent of the old notes, according to The Times of India. Post demonetisation, as these notes cease to be legal tender, the process of shredding them has begun, according to The Times of India report, which also mentions that the central banking institution has 40 verifying and shredding machines across 19 locations in India and the imported machines can destroy about 2,50,000 notes in an hour. It doesn’t stop there. [caption id=“attachment_3112630” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] A report in The Economic Times mentions that once these notes are shredded, the bits are sent to dealers for recycling or to make briquettes, which are compressed blocks of biomass material used for fuel. It adds that these notes will head to Western India Plywood (WIPL) yards in Kannur, Kerala — chosen by the RBI — for pulping. PK Mayan Mohamed, the managing director at WIPL, was quoted by The Economic Times as saying that they have received “over 140 tonnes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for pulping over the past three weeks” and the company was selected by RBI a few days before the note ban announcement on 8 November. These shreds of notes are combined thoroughly with wood chips before being fed into a press. “Out of every 100 kg of pulp compound pressed, only 7 kg is shredded notes; the rest is wood chips,” the report said. The  NDTV reported that the pulped and shredded currency will either be turned into briquettes or into stationery such as calendars, paper weights, files and boards. It added that this relatively new method is followed by most central banks to make briquettes out of soiled notes.