BPA powder on your receipts?!

You know that glossy, powdering feel of a receipt when the cashier hands you your “proof of purchase?”  Possibly worse than BPA in your plastic water bottle, BPA powder on that grocery receipt can easily get in your mouth and into your body.  Now you have two reasons to say “no thank you” to the receipt:  Saving paper and staying BPA free.

From Treehugger.com:

“Thermal imaging papers, the ones use in most cash registers, and carbonless copy papers (the ones used for most credit card receipts) both use BPA to provide the “magic” behind printing those receipts. According to Science News, when created, the papers are coated with a “powdery layer” of BPA and invisible ink. When pressure and/or heat are applied, the two materials merge together on the paper and you get color, aka your printed receipt.

BPA in water bottles, for example, is referred to as having nanograms of particles leaching out. BPA in cash registers receipts on the other hand typically has 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA, much more than you would find in your water bottle. To make matters worse, the BPA in receipts is free, meaning that the individual molecules are “loose and ready for the uptake” unlike water bottles or food containers where the particles are bound and have to be heated in order for you to be exposed. Thus far, no specific studies have been done to quantify just how much BPA we may be exposed to or whether it can stay on our fingers long enough for us to touch food and ingest it, or even if it can just permeate our skin.”

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So I would say “no thanks” to the receipt.  If you think you need a receipt to return something, ask them to put it in the bag and wash your hands if you handle it.  Another way to avoid BPA would be to buy online where your receipts are all electronic, there is no store using space, lighting, etc and you don’t have to drive around town using gas.  Hmmmm…