Will we ever be able to get rid of paper receipts?

Paper accounts of your spending might seem harmless, but they pose an environmental hazard. What should we do?You diligently recycle, you carry a reusable coffee cup and you have sworn off plastic straws. Yet your wallet is stuffed with crumpled scraps of paper recording all manner of recent (and ancient) transactions: the couple of quid at Tesco, the ?50 from a cash machine last week, that pricey pair of shoes from a year ago.Every year the UK pumps out 11.2bn paper receipts. What many of us probably don't realise - as Wired flagged on Tuesday - is that at least half of them can't be recycled; they are printed on what is known as "thermal paper" and coated with a potentially toxic substance called bisphenol A (or a substitute, BPS). The advice is that we should send thermal paper receipts to landfill, not the recycling bin. Continue reading...