Apple Encourages the Death of Paper Receipts

Though it might not be news to you regular Apple fans, in an effort to save paper and be more environmentally friendly, the Apple Store actually offers to email you your receipt instead of automatically and mindlessly printing it out and stuffing it in the bag like many other stores.


I’m not personally on a crusade against paper receipts, but only because it really hadn’t dawned on me exactly how many of my receipts that I actually just crumple up and throw to the bottom of my purse.

Apple, as a whole, is not doing so well on the big green scale (according to Greenpeace), but hey – this is a start, right?

Next time you're asked if you want a receipt, consider this:

"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.

It takes approximately 390 gallons of oil to produce a single ton of paper. At 640,000 tons of thermal receipt paper demanded per year, that’s 249,600,000 gallons of oil used during production. That much oil could produce 115,885,714 gallons of gas that could fill 7,023,376 gas tanks (assuming an average tank size of 16.5 gallons).

The amount of CO2 emitted by producing one ton of receipt paper is equivalent to the amount of exhaust a car emits while driving for an entire year. That’s 640,000 cars driving 24/7 for an entire year.

It takes approximately 19,075 gallons of H2O to produce a single ton of paper. This equates to 1,220,800,000 gallons of H2O used during the production process of receipt paper. That’s a lot of showers and swimming pools without water.

Approximately 2,278 lbs of trash is produced while producing a single ton of receipt paper. This means 1,457,920,000 lbs of trash are being fed into our landfill. This produces enough CO2 emissions to significantly damage the earth’s ozone layer, leading to global warming." [via]

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Bambi Blue is a freelance writer, editor, and codemonkey living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She moonlights as a jazz musician, a social butterfly, and most apparently a weisenheimer. Loves to cook, hates to clean, and can easily be found on Twitter.