The Many Problems With Paper Receipts

Paper receipts account for 640,000 tons of the paper that is made every year. It takes almost 10 million trees to create this paper, and it is all for something that most of us don’t want. We know as soon as the cashier hands it to us that we will just ball it up and throw it away.
The blog titled Software Advice surveyed 226 people in 2010 and discovered that 89% of them wanted to do away with paper receipts.
The first problem with paper receipts is that they make a lot of useless clutter. We wind up with them in our purses, wallets, and all over our house. They often end up becoming litter in public places because they blow away when we’re fiddling with shopping bags, wallets, and car doors.

There are many problems with paper receipts:

• Credit card receipts are a security risk because they contain enough of your information to allow the possibility for identity theft
• Credit card receipts are made out of special thermal paper that can NOT be recycled
• This thermal paper contains toxic Bisphenol A (BPA), which transfers to our skin on contact

We can ask for cashiers to give us no receipt. Gas stations ask you whether you want one before printing, and many retailers are adopting the electronic receipt policy. This is a great move that becomes more popular all the time, but it is not perfect.

Obstacles In The Path Of The Electronic Receipt Movement

If we want to make the most of this excellent idea, we need to address certain issues that are making it less than effective:

• The machines in most companies often spit out paper receipts whether you want them or not. Even if you ask for no receipt, it will still be printed.
• You may need A receipt for your gas to protect yourself against damages to your vehicle from bad gas, so you may still have to ask for a paper receipt anyway.
• Some companies that provide an email receipt still print out and hand you a paper coupon. At a certain pet store I frequent, I always accept the offer for an e-receipt and then watch in frustration as they print out this long sheet offering me a coupon or chance for a vacation.

There are many things we can do. We can ask for no receipt when we don’t need one. We can write to businesses and ask that they improve their transaction methods to offer us the option of receiving electronic receipts and stop automatically printing paper receipts. Matt Baxter-Reynolds on ZDnet suggested an interesting idea that businesses utilizing loyalty cards could include a code in the card with our email address and the preference for them to email us our receipts. This way the move could be made automatically when our card was swiped and the system could process it while the transaction was taking place. We could write that to our favorite businesses also.
Learn more about ways to reduce paper waste at Rethink Recycling.