Receipts keeping. What’s wrong?

Let’s do a small test together, open up your wallet, purse or the bag you just went shopping with. Look inside, and tell me how many receipts you found (you may leave the answer in comment). Fish them out and put them aside. On any day, I would easily find 3-4 receipts sitting nicely in my wallet. Today, we are going to look into those receipts.

Very often, you see “BPA free” on various types of products, from plastic water bottles to plastic food containers. We feel safe to see items labeled with a big “BPA free” sign. However, there is one item which you handle almost daily is with traces of BPA.

BPA on receipt, are you kidding me?

Do you know that…?

Receipt printed on thermal paper, is coated with BPA (powdery layer) for the purpose of heat-activated print development. Though food is still the No.1 route for BPA consumption, exposure to thermal paper printed receipts should not be overlooked as traces of BPA can be transferred to skin when being handled. Bear in mind, not all receipts are with this type of paper, but they are daily common these days. Now have a look at those receipts you took out, separated them into normal receipt paper and smooth silky touch paper (those that leave mark when you scratch them). Basically most receipts from credit card/ATM machines are printed on thermal paper, Apart from this, that small piece of queue number paper (mine was often from bank), that sticker-like thingy with barcode printed on your parcels, movie tickets, parking ticket, some airline boarding passes too may have used such paper type.

Problem is, there is no way to tell if the thermal paper receipt is coated with BPA or not. Even when they are labelled with BPA free, high chance the paper manufacturer has replaced BPA with BPS (that is a topic for another day). Research carried out revealed that 168 out of 170 receipts tested showed presence of BPA in concentrations range of 0.45-4.26% (Babu et al. 2015).

A research conducted by Porras et al. (2014) revealed that no change in urinary BPA levels for cashiers holding thermal printed receipt for 5 seconds, every 3 minute during a 8-hour work shift. What a relief! Nevertheless, I wonder how much of BPA has been transferred to my purse with my receipt keeping habit, and years of using.

However, this topic came into discussion on Tapintosh for TWO main reasons. Firstly, thermal printed receipt is coated with BPA (shocker!) and our contact with such has been increasing with lack of awareness, and secondly, this type of receipts is not always recyclable.

A word of advice, maybe avoid giving these receipts to your toddler to play with for a moment of peacefulness. If you are to keep those receipt for some reasons, keep it in a separate pouch. Wash hand with soap and water after handling.

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Find out more on why thermal paper receipts are not always recyclable in our upcoming post.

Note: BPA stands for bisphenol A.