What's money made of?

Howard Lake | 30 October 2011 | Blogs

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• Research and statistics

No, not a philosophical question in these straitened times. Given that we fundraisers spend a lot of time focusing on money, and ideally larger sums, I realised I didn’t know what money was made of, or at least the ‘paper’ variety we like.

I now know. UK banknotes are made of a mixture of cotton fibre and linen rag; euro notes are 100% cotton; and US notes are 75% cotton and 25% linen.

The figures are in The Inkjet Counterfeiter by Adam Higginbotham, published in Wired UK in November 2009, p 133.

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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.