Is the consumption of thermal paper at the checkout by receipt printers at the point of sale the next goal for Greentailers in their commitment to carbon neutrality?

Thermal receipt printers in retail stores consume hundreds of thousands of rolls of thermal paper daily. They do this while doing their job of printing receipts that are invariably discarded an hour after leaving the store. Retailers who are mindful of the mood of environmentally conscious consumers are constantly looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and paper consumption at the point of sale could be an attractive area to focus on. Especially since any savings in paper consumption would not only help the environment, but would also help reduce store costs.

In this article, we are quantifying the amount of thermal paper that a typical 700-store retail chain would use in one day and one year, and the impact that rationalizing the use of paper could have on an organization’s carbon footprint.

I selected 700 stores as a base because in the market that I am looking at, Australia, there are two major players in the supermarket arena, each with more than 700 stores in operation.

In a typical Australian supermarket, a checkout line at a point of sale will consume an average of 3.5 rolls of thermal paper per day. The weight of a roll of thermal paper included 333 grams of actual paper. An average supermarket will have at least 10 checkout lanes.

By doing the basic math, the case for saving paper becomes compelling:

1. 700 retail stores x 10 lanes per store = 7,000 checkout lanes for that retail chain
2. 7000 box lines x 3.5 rolls of thermal paper per day = 24,500 rolls of paper / day.
3. 24,500 rolls of paper x 333 grams / roll = 8,158,500 grams total, which equates to 8,1585 tons of paper per day.

This sounds like a lot of paper, and it is! It takes about 22 trees to make a single ton of thermal paper. So in our 700-store scenario above, where the retail chain consumes on average more than 8 tons of paper each day of operation, this equates to:

8.1585 tons of paper per day x 22 trees per ton = 179 trees per day

Most supermarkets are in business for at least 360 days in a given year and this daily tree consumption really skyrockets when you extrapolate these figures, because the number of trees consumed annually suddenly increases to:

179 trees consumed per day x 360 operating days = 64,440 trees per year!

If a green business could reduce its paper consumption by 50%, it would be saving 32,000 trees every year, 320,000 trees in a decade.

Multiply this number by the number of retail chains out there and we’re talking literally millions of mature trees that, to date, are proving to be the best carbon suction device available on the planet.

Can Green Retailers Make a Difference by Reducing Paper Consumption?

They sure can: A new generation of eco-friendly pos printer technology, or eco-printers, is available that saves 50% of paper. The question now is whether organic traders have the desire to move on.