Elio Silva has no more regard for credit card companies than most of us — probably less, in fact. But unlike most people, he has a plan to do something about them, and all those other financial forces which conspire to eat away at our money, percentage point by percentage point.

The answer is to make our own. Literally. He has begun doing it, producing a new currency, he calls the Martha’s Vineyard Greenback.

If only other people on this Island will join with him in using it, he believes, Martha’s Vineyard can begin, as he puts it, to “take ownership of its economy.”

Don’t laugh; the idea is not as odd as it might first seem. It is quite legal (no counterfeiting is involved), it works elsewhere, and he can make a strong case that it could work as well, or better, here.

The basic idea is simple. As an Island consumer — individual or business — you go to the bank, and exchange American dollars, at a fixed exchange rate of $1.10 for Greenbacks.

You pay a transaction cost of one per cent — with that money being set aside to provide funds to local charities and to finance micro-loans to start up small businesses on the Island, as well as to cover the administration costs of the scheme.

And you walk out with 109 Greenbacks, which you can then use to buy goods and services on the Island, as if they were American dollars.

So, in effect you get a nine per cent discount by using them. But only as long as you spend them here.

The idea, said Mr. Silva, who runs several small businesses on the Vineyard, came to him from his reading about the huge impact of keeping money circulating within a community.

“Keeping one dollar moving from one place to another to another to another within the community without getting chunks eaten off of it, really strengthens the community,” he said.

The trick, he realized, was to stop those chunks being eaten from the money. He cited the example of what happens when someone goes into an Island business and pays with a credit card.

“Say you use American Express,” he said. “If you buy one dollar’s worth of products, only 96 cents of that goes into the business owner’s account.

“He loses four per cent, and we don’t know where that money goes; it might end up in a bank in India or China. That’s leakage.

“Not only that, but that money goes right to the merchant’s bank account, which might not even be held in an Island bank account, and might be spent somewhere else. More leakage.”

“Or, say I pay my employees and they take their paycheck and they go to Walmart. Well, that’s our economy, stopped right there.”

Hence the idea of the Greenback, as a way to keep money going round and round here. Then Mr. Silva heard that some people living out in the Berkshires had started their own currency, and actually had a couple million dollars worth of their currency circulating.

He figured it would be easier to do in a more tightly geographically-defined area like the Vineyard, so he looked into it, and found a couple of problems. First, the people in the Berkshires were using actual paper money.

“It cost them about $17,000 to $20,000 just to print the money,” he said.

“Plus as a merchant I saw right away the problem of keeping the inventory of money in the store. Say Cronig’s was to do it. They have probably 20 cash registers, which would have to be doubled, with a second cash drawer to make change in the local currency.

“And each cash drawer costs about $100, and in each one you have to keep about $300 of money.

“You’d be talking about a big investment up front, and it’s very cumbersome, particularly for business to business transactions,” Mr. Silva said.

So he decided on a card, rather than cash.

“And doing it electronically is much simpler,” he said, using Cronig’s again as a hypothetical example.

“They could just pick up the phone to Educomp and say ‘I’d like to buy a printer. My Greenback number is X. Charge to it.

“Then Educomp goes to Zephrus and buys a meal. Or to Shirley’s or Ace, or back to Cronig’s for groceries.

“So every time the money circulates it’s like a doubling effect.”

The incentive for people to keep the money circulating is obvious.

“I have $1,000 if I take my Greenbacks to another Island business,” he said. “And if they take it to another business on the Island they still have $1,000. But if they take it to the bank to exchange it, they get only $900. Mr. Silva has presented his idea to various Island business operators and stirred some interest. But right now, he still is proving the technology on a small scale, with his own three businesses.

So far, he has put about $5,000 into making it work, including $1,500 for a machine to print the cards, and the cost of software.

“Right now, the cost for a business to participate would be about $1,400; we would like to bring it down to around $1,000,” he said.

In the first month, he circulated about $28,000 of Greenbacks among his customers, and also has begun paying his staff in part in Greenbacks. So far, it has all gone remarkably smoothly, he said.

“It took less than two hours of I.T. support to get everything hooked up. It’s not rocket science,” he said.

But getting the card widely accepted is only part of Mr. Silva’s vision.

“The electronic card can do a lot of things paper money can’t,” he said. “You could potentially negotiate a retirement plan or maybe even a health plan, because the Greenback is going to be a members’ organization.”

That’s way in the future, though. More immediately, he has plans for using that one per cent fee taken from each dollar-to-Greenbacks exchange to “make the Island a viable place to live.”

Thus the one per cent will go into a fund, along with membership fees and possibly donations, to support charities and make micro-loans for business start-ups.

He already has settled on a micro-business idea.

“A sun-dried tomato business,” he said. At the end of July/early August each year, there’s a lot of excess tomatoes here.

“Yet I buy sun-dried tomatoes from California right now and they’re very expensive.

“To set up a company would take about $30,000, and the product has a long shelf life, and high profit. So I would like to set that business up for someone. That’s my goal for this summer.”

And what is in it for Mr. Silva?

“I don’t want to make anything out of it,” he said, adding:

“My goal is to be like the Internet — to make it happen, to get people to run it, and not be involved in it. My benefit from it is going to be the same as every other person on the Island.”