Shredded Philippine Money!

Yes, what you see in the picture is real - shredded 1000 peso bills. Am I just too filthy rich that one day I decided to shred a bundle of one thousand peso banknotes? I wish!

Well, the truth is I got these banknotes for free, already shredded. Sometimes, the Bangko Sentral gives away shredded money when they have exhibits around the country. Of course they don't shred them just for that! The Central Bank regularly shreds worn-out and defective paper bills so they may be replaced with fresh notes. When they misspelled the president's name as "Arrovo" instead of "Arroyo", they were forced to shred millions of 100 peso bills.

In the United States, their federal reserve shreds so much of their banknotes (7000 tons annually!) they are having a problem of where to place them all. They've used the shreds as stuffing for mattresses but the dirty bills were just too smelly and causes rashes. They plan to use the shreds to make materials for roofing and for walls . They even plan to build entire buildings with it. Some prefer to make money stationery. I guess these shreds would make good confetti too.

Bangko Sentral was nice enough to package these banknote shreds into little pouches. Here I got shredded 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1000 peso bills (I can't find the pouch with 500s).

Would you try piecing these together again? They say if you could put together more than 50% of a torn banknote, the banks will redeem it. Good luck!

UPDATE: I have some shredded 500 peso bills to spare. I can send you some but you will need to pay for freight and packaging costs. Send me an email at the address below if you're interested.