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The risky chemical lurking in your wallet / New research finds that the BPA in cash register receipts can be absorbed through skin. (article from 2014)
Explainer: Store receipts and BPA (from 2017)
Is BPA on Thermal Paper A Health Risk? - includes tips on reducing exposure. Yikes... "Quickly wash your hands after touching a receipt. Scrub with soap and water. If you wait longer than four minutes, it’s too late."
Explainer: Store receipts and BPA (from 2017)
“When people talk about polycarbonate bottles, they talk about nanogram quantities of BPA [leaching out],” Warner observed back around 2009. A nanogram is a billionth of a gram. “The average cash register receipt that's out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA,” he reported several years back. That’s a million times more than what ends up in a bottle. (By free, he explained, it’s not bound into a polymer, like the BPA in a bottle. The individual molecules are loose and ready for uptake.)
Is BPA on Thermal Paper A Health Risk? - includes tips on reducing exposure. Yikes... "Quickly wash your hands after touching a receipt. Scrub with soap and water. If you wait longer than four minutes, it’s too late."
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 04:37 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 12:55 pm (UTC)From:I didn't realize this was a reason why some stores offer digital receipts.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 04:52 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 01:02 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 02:39 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 02:44 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 07:14 am (UTC)From:To break it down, cashiers have either scheduled or no breaks, so they're not going anywhere for literally hours at a time, so have no way to leave the register to go to wash their hands after handling each and every receipt, which even if a sink was available in each station, would not only be time-consuming but likely to dry their hands out beyond what's even salvageable.
And customers would either have to 1) refuse the receipt (some always do), 2) leave their bags with the cashier to go back in the store to wash up, which would risk unmanageable piles of peope's bags at registers or 3) take their bags with them to go wash up, which risks being either followed or questioned by loss prevention for suspicion of theft (you would not believe how crazed loss prevention can get over bags going back in the store).
Of course, in any Walmart-type store where restrooms are located in front of or nearby registers bags can be carried into them quite swiftly, so this gets somewhat easier for their customers, though no easier or any better for their cashiers (and the logistics of waiting your turn at sinks that have lines to wash receipt ink off *everyone* who touches it would be impossible to negotiate in almost any store, so this whole thought exercise verges on the nonsensical, anyhow).
So that's all just a mess, right there.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 01:17 pm (UTC)From:It seems to me the government should require stores, at least large ones like Walmart and Kroger, to start phasing out receipts that contain BPA or BPS.
I didn't know about this issue, so I've always chosen paper receipts over digital, even when given a choice, and I usually keep the receipts in a notebook for several months. Now I'm reconsidering all that... Yesterday when reading those articles, I thought that surely it only affects some of the receipts I get, not most of them. But I just did a scratch test on the ones in my notebook, and all of them seem to discolor from the scratches, even though it's a fairly light discoloration... though the first link said to check for a "dark mark" from the scratches, so now I'm still not sure. All of the receipts being stacked together may be causing cross-contamination too.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 05:30 pm (UTC)From:You can tell thermal not just by the ink but the paper itself, which will be thin and shiny, while the dot matrix ink variety will look duller, and feel slightly thicker. If you keep that in mind you can weed out most thermal receipts that might cross your path.
It's too late for me now and I've known that for years, so I take and store all my receipts, too, in the front of my coupon book. The only store I shop at even once a year that currently offers to email receipts is Home Depot (and I took them up on that); with every other store there's been pretty much no other choice.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-30 02:10 am (UTC)From:I think I know what you're talking about, but for some reason every single one of the receipts I have in my notebook right now seems to be the thin shiny kind.