Walk into a bakery or a bookshop in Bavaria‘s Chiemgau region, and you might spot a customer paying with what looks like play money — colorful banknotes printed with grasshoppers, ladybugs and other insects.
“An estimated 10 to 15% of customers pay this way,” one bookseller told DW.
The locals call it the “Chiemgauer” — and it’s a currency they invented themselves.
Quirky as it sounds, it underpins a micro financial system that has been running for more than two decades — and has recently evolved into a tool for cutting carbon emissions in this picturesque corner of southeastern Germany.
A classroom experiment that got out of hand
The Chiemgauer was born in 2003 at a local high school, where economics teacher Christian Gelleri and a group of students were looking for a way to support local businesses losing customers to shopping malls and big chains.
Their solution was a new currency, designed to keep money circulating within the region. They printed it, handed it out and one by one locals began using the Chiemgauer and stores began accepting it.
Slowly, a classroom idea turned into a financial system.
“Five million Chiemgauers are being spent annually now,” said Gelleri, who still heads the association managing the currency, Chiemgauer e.V. Today, €1 equals one Chiemgauer.
In its office in the town of Traunstein in the Alpine foothills, Gelleri opens the group’s vault to reveal thick stacks of banknotes.
“These are more than 200,000 Chiemgauers, worth the same amount in euros,” Gelleri said proudly. These notes are now created by a professional company and carry watermarks and anti-counterfeiting features.
Under German law, printing and using money other than euros can be a criminal offense. But because the Chiemgauer is confined to the region and used by only around 4,200 people and 300 businesses, Germany’s central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, tolerates it. Those who want to use the money must sign up to the Chiemgauer association.
How a little trick keeps this money moving
A walk through the shops of Traunstein with their colorful facades illustrates how the system works. In an organic food store, a customer pays for cheese and sausages with a 50-Chiemgauer banknote. “I run an organic food store myself and partly use the Chiemgauer earnings for my own purchases,” he told DW.
It’s the same for a vendor selling Mediterranean delicacies from a marketplace stall. “We use our Chiemgauer earnings to pay the supplier we buy our fresh ingredients from,” she explained. This way, the money goes around, either in cash or electronically with a special card that works with regular bank accounts.
To keep a note valid and the Chiemgauer moving, holders must buy a small stamp every six months. The stamp for a 10-Chiemgauer note costs about €0.30 ($0.35), for example. After three years, bills expire entirely. Private users cannot convert Chiemgauers to euros. Businesses can convert the funds, but pay a 5% fee to do so. That fee then funds the currency’s operations and supports local nonprofit organizations.
Buy balcony solar, get free Chiemgauers
In recent years, Gelleri and the Chiemgauer organizers have introduced an environmental dimension to their currency. Residents can now earn bonus Chiemgauers by making climate-friendly choices — whether that means getting jeans repaired instead of buying new ones, using car-sharing platforms or insulating homes with natural materials. These actions are rewarded with bonuses ranging from one to 200 Chiemgauers.
“The owner of this set of solar panels got 100 Chiemgauers,” said Gelleri, pointing at two panels set up in a backyard in Traunstein. “In 20 years, this balcony power set will save 11 tons of carbon dioxide.”
Local residents and businesses fund the rewards by contributing to a shared pool to offset their emissions — a kind of mini emissions trading system. For every ton of carbon offset through the fund, 9 tons are saved through the climate-friendly behavior it incentivizes.
Similar climate bonus schemes have since spread from Bavaria to four more regions across Germany. Over the past four years, it has saved 12,800 tons of CO2 in total — equivalent to the emissions of around 2,000 German cars over the same period, according to independent auditors TÜV Nord.
A small, global trend
The Chiemgauer is far from unique. Around 300 “complementary currencies” — named for the way they operate alongside a country’s official currency — exist worldwide. Most are concentrated in Europe and Brazil, where the focus is on promoting the local economy and welfare. But as a side effect, they also reduce transport emissions.
“The currencies push local shopping, which then makes the supply chains shorter, because vendors purchase locally produced goods,” said Ester Barinaga, who researches complementary currencies at the University of Lund in Sweden. According to the MIT and the International Energy Agency, freight transportation makes up 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of these currencies are designed specifically to encourage environmentally friendly behaviors. In the Spanish city of Viladecans, for example, the “Vilawatt” rewards residents for saving energy. In Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere “Plastic Bank” tokens are given to people who collect and hand in plastic bottles for recycling.
Yet all these currencies have their limits, and the Chiemgauer is no exception. Clothing, electronics and most manufactured goods are still produced abroad and imported. Fewer than 1% of people in the region participate in the system. And if it were to grow much larger, Germany’s central bank could step in to regulate it.
Even so, for Barinaga, complementary currencies carry an important lesson; however small they may be in the grand scheme of things.
“Money can be designed,” she said. “If money is created to reward pro-environmental behaviors, then you’re going to have more people behaving pro-environmentally.”
Edited by: Jennifer Collins
