As I was telling the cashier at the supermarket that I didn’t want the register receipt, I thought about the public hearing that is going to be held this Wednesday, February 22, 2011 in Hartford, CT to ban Bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor, from cash register receipts.
According to Associated Press;
Connecticut lawmakers are being asked to ban a chemical that some scientists consider to be dangerous, from being used in paper cash register and ATM receipts.
The Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Connecticut is pushing to ban the chemical from the receipts, often thermal paper. Advocates say they worry about the chemical rubbing off and somehow being ingested or being absorbed through the skin…
The General Assembly’s Environment Committee has scheduled a public hearing on Wednesday to hear testimony on the proposed legislation, which prohibits the use of the bisphenol (BISS’-phen-ol) A in paper used for receipts
This hearing will be significant since the federal government refused to ban BPA last year, leaving it up to us to avoid BPA. So if the state government can ban BPA, we are heading towards the right direction. And as Safechemicals.org reported, BPA is even on our dollar bills as BPA powder from the thermal imaging paper that receipts are made of get transferred to everything we touch, including on our hands and money. Although the amount of BPA on dollar bills is minimum, as I posted earlier, the accumulative effect can be harmful.
You can read my posts on BPA on register receipts and other surprising places here, about the Endocrine Society’s report here and Europe’s ban here.
But I’ll be waiting to hear what happens this Wednesday from my neighboring state on banning BPA from cash register receipts.
Meanwhile, I refuse all register receipts if I can. The receipts in the photo for this post are, ahem…, the ones that my absent minded husband brought home.
Oh, by the way, I got a kick out of this Google search screen earlier when I was researching about the hearing. My past posts on BPA were 8th and 12th on the search! Either no one is writing about this and mine are the only ones that made the list (which is really not true) or my posts are, ahem, awesome!
Either way, I thought it was cool.
If I find out what happens this Wednesday, I’ll let you know.
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