by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
British supermarkets issue over 26,000 miles of till receipts every week in the run up to Christmas – more than enough paper to go around the entire circumference of the world – and virtually all of it is wasted.
These are the findings of a leading expert in waste and recycling, which has calculated that around 270 tons of till receipts are printed out for customers, many of which are thrown straight into bins along with non-recyclable single-use carrier bags.
Most of those receipts, and everything else that is printed from the till roll, is also on a special kind of paper that does not really recycle well, if at all. It is a so-called thermal paper as the printers does not actually ink but heat to create the “imprint”. In addition to that the paper is laced with BPA, which is a known health risk.
Stores that print out additional offers along with the legally required receipt make the problem worse by producing paper that customers almost always ignore. And those are just the receipts, etc., that are issued over the run-up to Christmas.
Factor in to that the estimated 150 million supermarket and convenience store transactions every week, and a couple of feet soon turns into thousands of miles.
In extreme cases, a customer can sometimes leave a store with:
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Till receipt
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Separate bank card receipt
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Money saving offers
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"You saved… compared to our competitors" promotions
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Loyalty vouchers to collect
While the receipt itself is a (legal) requirement, it is the reams of promotional material to which we should object, leaving customers walking away with armfuls of ticker tape that they often bin, along with their carrier bags.
Those estimated 150 million weekly grocery transactions equate to:
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26,000 miles of paper, more than enough to reach around the world's 24,000 circumference
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270 tons of paper, most of which is discarded rather than recycled because, as indicated already above, some of the paper is mostly non-recyclable
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A year's worth of till receipts would reach from the moon and back – twice
The frightening thing is that the data is only confined this to grocery stores in the United Kingdom. Add to that other business sectors like DIY warehouses and petrol stations, add in the rest of the world – that weekly till roll is going to wrap the world up like a gift bow, and that's not a good thing.
© 2017
