Star Wars

BPA in Receipts!

I saw on The Daily Green the other day that the major source of BPA in our environment is not from plastics, but from sales receipts! They had cited a Science News article discussing the work of John Warner, the developer of carbonless copy paper and thermo paper. Take some paper, slap some BPA on it, then cover it in invisible ink. Then, when heat is applied, the BPA and the ink together form color.

That was a couple decades ago. So now that BPA is in the news as being an estrogen-mimic (which is what makes it so horrible), he has analized the free BPA content of cash register receipts. You know the concern about BPA in baby bottles and other plastics. Well, most of the BPA has been polymerized, but there's still some free BPA left -- we're talking nanogram quantities. But because there's no polymerization on thermo paper, there's 60-100 milligrams of free BPA per receipt! And it just dusts right off. 100 milligrams is 100,000,000 times as many as 1 nanogram.

And what do you do with receipts? Pick them up, put them in your purse or pocket. Then maybe eat the food you just purchased. Or get in your car and drive away. It comes off your hands onto whatever you touch to be spread about more later. Or you digest it immediately, if you're eating. Then maybe you get it all over your hands again when you organize your receipts or throw it away. And it continues to spread. -- Or worse, you're eating in a restaurant where the servers are bringing your food to you after having just printed out the previous customers receipt. Oh, and it's all over your table.

What's the solution? Well, it's going to take a bit for someone to come up with a new way of printing reciepts so conveniently, and then all the cash registers will have to be replaced, or at least the printer part. But in the meantime, all we can do is request no receipt. I just feel really sorry for people who work at registers.