We need digital receipts. It is ridiculous how we are printing foot-long receipts for simple, everyday purchases. 

In the United States alone, we produce approximately 686 million to 1.5 billion pounds of paper receipts every year. Globally, we are looking at roughly 4.5 billion to 5 billion pounds of receipt paper produced annually. If you stacked all these receipts, the pile would reach over 18,000 miles high. That’s not just one Mount Everest: that’s 3,300 Everests stacked on top of each other, every year. This is also roughly equivalent in weight to 380,000 African elephants, or enough paper to circle the Earth more than 1,000 times if laid end to end.^[1]

Producing this much paper requires the destruction of approximately 25 million trees and the use of over 20 billion gallons of water every single year.^[2]

If you haven’t shit your pants yet, the “chemical cocktail” used to make these receipts means they aren’t even a productive part of the waste cycle. Because about 90% of these are coated in BPA or BPS, they effectively poison the recycling stream if they aren’t diverted to a landfill.^[3]

We need to enact digital-first laws. We can easily have an app for this, You scan a code, get your receipt send to you digitally, and done.

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This is an excerpt of Research and Advice, Fourth Edition, out August 10, 2026

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 ^[1]        “Skip the Slip: Environmental Costs of Paper Receipts,” Green America, accessed February 2026, https://reports.greenamerica.org/skip-the-slip.

 ^[2]        Id.

 ^[3]        “BPA and BPS in Paper Receipts,” Ecology Center, last modified 2024, https://www.ecocenter.org/healthy-stuff/reports/bpa-bps-paper-receipts.