Paper Receipts – Are They Wasteful? (A Poll)

As credit and debit card transactions continue their prominence in our financial lives have you ever stopped to wonder if paper receipts are wasteful? When you’re at the ATM do you opt to take the receipt even if you’ve only withdrawn cash?

We accumulate them every day by the fistful. By and large they don’t seem necessary what with the majority of financial institutions offering online banking, or at least the ability to receive electronic statements.

Today an interest article pondering this very issue came to our attention. The site Software Advice has an article titled “Please Kill the Paper Receipt” that was published late last week. In it the author, Don Fornes, provides some solid information that the production of paper receipts do some real damage to the environment.

In the article Fornes presents some facts from allEtronic, a company that is working to help consumers move away from paper receipts. Here is just an excerpt that we found especially concerning:

50% of forests have been cleared and 50% of that is for paper. 9 million trees a year, just for paper. It takes approximately 15 trees to produce a single ton of paper. Receipt paper demands in the US are 640,000 tons per year. This equates to 9,600,000 millions trees cut down each year just to produce paper receipts.

Admittedly, allEtronic, whose business depends on the adoption of electronic receipts, wouldn’t necessarily be considered an objective source of this information. Still, it is still compelling information about paper receipts and how they impact our world.

We encourage you to check out the rest of their article and vote in their poll. When we submitted our vote (yes, of course) 95% of those who had already responded believed that paper receipts are wasteful.

What do you think? Are paper receipts wasteful? Leave us a comment below or visit Software Advice’s blog and let your voice be heard.

Tagged as: Business, Financial Services, Materials, Online banking, Paper, Pulp and Paper