This guest post comes from Michael, a contributing editor of the Dough Roller, a personal finance and investing blog, and Credit Card Offers IQ, a credit card review site.

If you had to guess how many credit and debit cards were in circulation today, (active) what would your answer be?

With an estimated US population of 308,500,000 people, would it be safe to assume one card per person? Maybe two cards? Well, guessing aside, the actual number of credit and debit cards in circulation today is 2.1 Billion! (2,180,000,000). If you break it down to cards per person, everyone is responsible for an average of 7 cards, including kids born in the hospital yesterday. That’s a lot of plastic!

The average credit card weighs a fifth of an ounce (0.20oz) so the total weight of these 2.1 billion cards is a whopping 2.7 million pounds. Just thinking about that amount of plastic will ruin the day of eco-activists, but the demand will surely increase year after year and the supply will need to be met.

So how are these light but powerful pieces of plastic made? The entire process is fairly simple and tens of thousands of cards can be made in a matter of minutes. Depending on the issuer of the card, a special series of inks and dyes are used that are specific to plastic and the use of magnetic ink ensures the coded strip on the back of every card works every time. The actual manufacturing takes place in the following four stages:

1. Compounding and Molding – Credit or debit cards are created in sheets and the plastic for the sheet is made from melting PVCA (polyvinyl chloride acetate) with other materials. The mixture is then placed on a flat surface so it can be pressed down to the appropriate card thickness.
2. Printing – After the sheet has cooled down, it’s time to send it to the printers. Silk screening is used to print each card and the design on every card is the same so the process is seamless.
3. Laminating – That beautiful gloss that you find on every credit or debit card is created after the card has been printed and every credit card sheet that contains 63 total cards is laminated.
4. Embossing and Cutting – Finally, the last step in creating a credit or debit card is embossing it with a name and a card number then cutting it from the sheet of 63. It is in this step that a credit card becomes unique and is embossed with a number to verify its legitimacy. Each card endures a quality control check to make sure it can withstand normal wear and tear, it’s magnetic strip works and the information printed on the card is accurate.

The American National Standards Institute defines the quality that a credit or debit card must have before it is mailed to customers and with the change in technology every year; the quality standards for credit cards are updated regularly. Some issuers like Bank of America take the production of credit and debit cards one step further and include a picture ID on the card that can be used to identify you when purchases are made.

Thankfully, these credit cards can be recycled if you want them to be and many of the guitar picks and plastic key rings you use are made from old credit cards.

The next time you have an expired credit card in your wallet you have a decisions to make… do the financially smart thing and cut that card into shreds and toss it in the trash or be green and recycle it.

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