Plastic card
card made of PVC or other plastic conforming
Plastic cards usually serve as identity documents, thus providing authentication. In combination with other assets that complement the data stored on the card, like PINs, they also serve authorization purposes, most often as debit or credit cards for allowing their holders to make financial transactions. Early and simpler cards feature only hard-to-imitate integrated photographs, security holograms, guillochés, or a magnetic strip on which few bytes of personal data could be stored. Today, smart cards, i.e. those equipped with an electronic chip (storage, or RFID), serve as high-security active electronic documents that allow their holder to qualify for driving cars (drivers license card), receive medical treatment (health insurance cards), do banking and more.
Industry
In their January 2020 report, the International Card Manufacturers Association's (ICMA) indicates a production increase to a record-high of 37.1 billion cards and $27 billion revenue in 2019. Forecasts predicted market growth at a rate of 8.2% from 2021 to 2028, which was counteracted by losses through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Production
Plastic cards (standard size ID-1) come in various colors and finishing. The laminated mixture of various dyes, paper and plastics (so far mainly PVC and PVCA) and the integration with electronics makes them hard to recycle.
Classification
Type
Range
Contact cards (must be inserted into a suitable reading device, e.g.
“Plastic card” enters the record as card made of PVC or other plastic conforming. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Plastic, card and made can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Plastic card” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Plastic, card and made provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109973930. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2019, 2021 and 2028.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plastic card” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.