They clearly haven’t done anything to make sure that the replacements that come onto the market aren’t hazardous.” “Clearly, Health Canada is neglecting the fact that workers like cashiers are the ones that are bearing the brunt of this issue.” Malas calls it a “the perfect example of the failure of Canada’s toxic chemical regulatory approach. Where is Canada in the midst of all this? Health Canada says it has “not concluded that BPA in thermal receipt paper is a significant source of exposure for the general population” and adds that “currently, there are no plans to ban the use of BPA and BPS on receipts.” Environmental Defence’s toxics program manager, Muhannad Malas, says the Feds aren’t talking about the health impacts to cashiers who deal with hundreds of receipts a day. The EU is officially banning the use of BPA in receipts by next year, and California is considering outlawing paper receipts altogether, pushing retailers to go digital by 2022.
With pressure mounting around the globe, the humble paper receipt has become the latest litmus test for action on hormone-disrupting chemicals. “We’ve been guinea pigs for a long time, workers and consumers alike,” says Mary Shaw, a health and safety representative with UFCW, “but for workers who are handling thousands of receipts a week, they’re disproportionately exposed to these chemicals.” Shaw says the union has been in talks with major grocers about switching to safer alternatives such as digital receipts or no receipt at all. The United Food and Commercial Workers union shares these concerns. With more than 250,000 women in Canada working as cashiers and over 350,000 women working in retail, Environmental Defence is concerned that a significant proportion of women who come in direct daily contact with receipts are of childbearing age and, according to its report, “may face unacceptable health risks because of exposure to BPA and BPS on the job.”
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However, a 2017 meta-analysis of nearly a decade of studies on the topic found that BPS is not only “ubiquitous in the environment” and in human urine, much like BPA, but that it “may have adverse effects on reproductive systems, endocrine systems, and nervous systems in animals and humans, and may trigger oxidative stress.”Īnd yet BPS is now on 75 percent of the receipts we come in contact with, according to a 2018 study by the Michigan-based Ecology Center, which tested 207 paper receipts from major American grocers, big-box stores and retailers, as well as gas stations, movie theatres and libraries. Compared to the large body of studies on BPA, investigations into BPS remain limited. Headlines like “BPA Replacement Also Alters Hormones” started emerging in scientific mags several years ago, but by all indications, most companies were looking the other way. The problem is that most large retailers in North America adopted alternatives made with BPA’s sister chemical, BPS. By that point, a whole slew of national retailers, like Costco, opted to move away from the troubled hormone disruptor. In 2016, California mandated that any stores distributing BPA-laced products post signs warning customers that BPA is a known female reproductive toxin. But after Health Canada declared BPA officially toxic in 2010 (banning it from baby bottles but not tin can linings or receipts), forward-thinking retailers big and small, including Metro and the Big Carrot Community Market, quickly sought out BPA-free alternatives. It all adds up to bad news for major Canadian retailers.īPA was long the coating of choice for thermal receipts (the shiny kind that fade over time). The results of an experiment released last week by Environmental Defence found that handling thermal receipts for around 15 minutes (the estimated time a cashier comes in contact with receipts over an eight-hour shift) caused significant spikes in urine levels of hormone-disrupting Bisphenol A (BPA), as well as BPA’s controversial replacement chemical, Bisphenol S (BPS). Turns out common thermal receipts also deliver a dose of estrogen-mimicking chemicals, which is thrusting the spotlight on the workers who handle them and the retailers that dole them out. Wedged into wallets, they chronicle the highs and lows of our retail therapy, our mid-afternoon mocha binges and the daily tab for being human in a consumer economy. We come in contact with them every day of our lives.
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