Do you put out your hand to accept a receipt, only to drop it into your purse or stuff it into your pocket until you can put it in the trash? You might want to ask the clerk to throw it out for you instead. John C. Warner, an organic chemist who worked in the industry of receipt making in the 1990s, remembered that the paper was coated in bisphenol A (BPA), according tp Science News. BPA is a plasticizer that has been found to increase risk of breast cancer, reproductive problems, learning disabilities, and more.
Warner tested receipts as recently as September, 2009 to see if BPA is still loaded on receipt paper. He found that “The average cash register receipt that’s out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA.”
“When people talk about polycarbonate bottles, they talk about nanogram quantities of BPA,” Warner observes. “The average cash register receipt that’s out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA.”
By Annie B. Bond, best-selling and award-winning author of five green living books, thousands of blogs, and all the tips in the Greenify Everything app. Called “The Godmother of Green” by Martha Stewart Sirius Radio.
