The Production of Highly Secured Plastic Cards

摘要

Everyone has plastic in their pockets. It's a bold statement, but you would be hard pressed to look in any wallet or purse and not find a plastic card of some sort. We all have them: credit cards, drivers' licenses, ID cards, store gift cards, building entry cards, prepaid phone cards, etc. The list goes on and on. With the predominance of these cards in today's society, few people realize exactly what goes into their production and exactly what is embedded in many of the cards we carry around with us on a daily basis. To put this in perspective, there are approximately 30 billion such cards produced annually1. That's 30,000,000,000! Of these, 8 billion are smart cards (with some form of technology embedded inside the card) and 22 billion are traditional cards. To give you an idea of the size of this market, there were $15 billion worth of cards were produced in 20101.