The True Cost Of Receipts

Those little receipts stuffed into your wallet aren’t just annoying. They’re actually putting your health at risk – and the planet’s, too.

- Melinda Murphy

Every purchase in Hong Kong comes with one, sometimes two, slips of paper, which usually end up in the bottom of a purse or wadded up in a pocket, only to eventually end up in the rubbish. Even if you say you don’t want a receipt, it’s still printed and lands in the store’s waste bin instead of yours. That’s bad news.

Why? Because receipts are almost always printed on thermal paper, which is coated with bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA. Yup, the very stuff you won’t let your kids have in their water bottles is all over those little pieces of paper. Worse yet, the levels of BPAs on receipts are stunningly high. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group did some testing and found that receipts have BPA levels up to 1,000 times higher than those inside the lining of a metal can.

And that has scary consequences.

A big study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2014 found that BPA is absorbed through the skin, so handling those receipts could cause some major health issues such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, insomnia, arthritis, heart disease, MS, infertility and more. Pregnant mothers can pass BPA onto unborn children, too, which can create all sorts of horrible developmental problems.

If you don’t handle a lot of receipts, it may not seem like a big deal, but cashiers, for example, or people who collate receipts for events could be in real danger. Also, if your hands are greasy, it makes the absorption faster, so think about the times you’ve used a squirt of hand sanitiser then grabbed your bag of fast food with the receipt stapled at the top.