CaixaBank turns expired customer cards into street furniture for rural Spain #

Spain’s CaixaBank is installing public benches made from recycled bank cards in villages served by its mobile branch network. The first bench was unveiled on 24 June in the Ávila municipality of Serranillos, with 40 communities across the province scheduled to receive one.

The benches are fabricated from plastic recovered from expired or unused payment cards returned by customers through bank branches. Each batch sent to a certified manufacturer comes with an official recycling certificate. The finished units have a straight design with back support and armrests, meeting Spanish accessible mobility guidelines. CaixaBank is donating them to local municipal councils for placement in public squares where its mobile branches, called ofimóviles, make scheduled stops, giving residents a place to wait for the service in communities with no permanent bank branch.

CaixaBank launched its card-collection and recycling programme in 2019. Since then it has recovered and processed 4.6 million cards, roughly 23 tonnes of plastic. Since 2024, more than 500,000 customers have received notifications confirming their returned cards were recycled.

The bench initiative was presented jointly by CaixaBank’s territorial director for Castilla y León, Gerardo Cuartero; the first vice-president of the Diputación de Ávila, Jesús Martín; and the mayor of Serranillos, Carlos Cayuela.

The project extends a partnership formed between CaixaBank and the Diputación de Ávila at the start of 2025, which brought the bank’s mobile branch service to 227 municipalities in the province that lack a branch or have restricted access to in-person banking. That rollout made Ávila the first province in Castilla y León to achieve full financial inclusion under the nationally monitored framework developed by the IVIE in collaboration with banking associations AEB, CECA and UNACC, a milestone also recognised by the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute. The bank currently operates 40 branches and four mobile units across the province, serving approximately 34,000 customers.

CaixaBank began issuing cards made from recycled and biodegradable materials in 2021 and had surpassed six million recycled-plastic cards produced annually in Spain by 2022.

Source: CaixaBank Newsroom