Professor David Solomon has received the top-tier Companion (AC) in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, but he only has to open his wallet for proof of his value to science.

The type of plastic banknote he co-invented, first circulated in Australia 1988, has since been exported to 34 countries including Canada, Chile and Vietnam, and is soon to be released in the UK.

In 2014-15 alone, Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank, delivered 166 million Australian banknotes and 152 million banknotes to other countries.

But Professor Solomon, 86, an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne's department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is not the big-headed type.

Although he receives no royalties from the notes, he says "that doesn't worry me. I'm not driven by that. I was employed by CSIRO and it was my job."

Although the banknote is "a great achievement and I don't want to downplay it", he is prouder of his broader breakthrough of working out how to custom-build plastics by controlling the structure, composition and properties of polymers.

The chemistry is applicable to fields as diverse as cosmetics, computers and paint. He was admitted to the elite Royal Society in 2004 and in 2011 he and Professor Ezio Rizzardo were awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.

Currently, he is working with Professor Greg Qiao, head of the university's polymer group, to develop new paints, car oils, and biomedical applications such as eye implants.

A Melbourne criminal gang's 1966 forgery of $800,000 worth of $10 bills sparked the then Reserve Bank governor, Herbert 'Nugget' Coombs, to ask senior scientists to design more secure banknotes. Professor Solomon began his work on the "secret project" at CSIRO in 1967.

He says partly because the RBA was a reluctant commercial exporter and technology leader, it wasn't until 1988 that it released the first polymer $10 notes, with clear plastic windows and holograms that deterred backyard note printing.

But Professor Solomon has advised the RBA to employ scientists to keep ahead of the forgers."I said, 'It's never going to be over'. You can't sit still. You've got to get out  in front and stay there, and so that's what's happening. They employ scientists who are coming up with new and improved notes all the time."

He is "absolutely delighted" with the Order of Australia to complement his science honours, and the recognition from wider society was satisfying.

Among other scientists in the Queen's Birthday Honours list are CSL chief scientific officer Dr Andrew Cuthbertson; Professor Doug Hilton, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of medical research; Dr Anthony Radford, part of the team that invented and commercialised technology for an internationally adopted test for TB; and David Le Couteur, University of Sydney professor of geriatric medicine.