Really. As if getting it out of our water bottles and toys wasn't bad enough, now we need to worry about receipts?! Something we all encounter daily and it's pretty much beyond our control.
Environmental Working Group did a study on paper receipts from various places and found BPA on 40 percent of them. Sometimes in amounts over 1000 times that found in the lining of cans. One thousand times?! How can that be allowed?
Think about it, we're worried about drinking water from BPA containing water bottles and how that will get ingested and affect us. Here are receipts that we carry around for quite awhile sometimes, that we touch many times, many people and they contain even more BPA. I know I'm guilty of handing the receipt to my little ones as we exit a store, unknowingly exposing them to even more BPA than the water bottles I refuse to allow them to use.
Think about the store workers that spend all day handing out those receipts. What about business owners with stacks of receipts for tax purposes? How about the accountant? What other papers contain BPA?
I'm going to quote this paragraph from washingtonpost.com because I feel it really gets the point across:
Among those surveyed, receipts from Safeway supermarkets contained the highest concentration of BPA. A receipt taken from a store in the District contained 41 milligrams of the chemical. If the equivalent amount of BPA was ingested by a 155-pound adult, that would exceed EPA's decades-old safe exposure limit for BPA by 12 times.
This very long article is worth a read. There's also information about what store receipts were tested and what they contained. A study was released that shows that BPA does penetrate the skin, so we know we're absorbing it from our receipts. EWG simply used a wet wipe on the receipt and then tested the BPA content. If it was that easy to transfer to the wipe, it's that easy to transfer to our hands.
The type of receipts that contain BPA are thermal paper receipts. To check your receipt, rub it with a coin. Thermal paper will discolor, while normal paper does not. This type of paper is commonly used for store receipts, prescription labels, lottery and airline tickets.
Sometimes I feel like we should all just live in a bubble. Maybe I should drop my lottery habit.