Well, it's not mandatory to print a receipt in Germany. Only the purchase itself needs to be recorded and the receipt can be issued in a digital form as well. It's up to the retailers how they want to implement this.

Let's take the two local bakeries in my neighborhood as an example. One still issues paper receipts and complains since three years about this law with witty share pics that he has to raise prices because of all the paper he needs to buy and that the government does not trust family businesses. And the other one simply provides a QR code on the cash registry's screen which I can scan within 60 seconds to download the receipt (if I want to) or he prints one if asked to do so.

In fact, I do not see big differences to the situation in France.

That works to combat tax fraud though. Cash payment is incredibly popular in Germany, partly because many stores or restaurants outright refuse card payments to avoid paying taxes.

And the right/alt right tries to defend it saying it creates jobs

Often in the US you'll be asked if you want a receipt, but saying no will frequently have the receipt printed anyway but they just throw it away. It's pretty stupid.

In France in my local supermarket, since several days, we can print only a small receipt just for the scanning barriers if we want. This is still some waste though.

In Sweden there are digital mailboxes that are considered just as bound to you as physical mail boxes (normal email is considered too flimsy for official mail etc).

If you have such a mailbox a lot of stores will send the receipt digitally instead of printing it at the POS. Although it only works if they know who you are (i.e you basically have to have a membership with the store).

The paper commonly used for receipts is thermal paper, which doesn't usually have any wax in it. But it's still not recyclable due to the other chemicals in it.

It's pretty simple, modify the electronic payments circuits to have them transmit virtual receipts, and continue using paper for receipts of cash payments

My understanding of the push on gas stoves is more health reasons, such as the increased link to asthma in children.

Even as someone with a gas stove, I don't really see an issue with that. Things get restricted and banned for health & safety all the time. When I was growing up, cigarettes were everywhere and now you barely see them. Seems a weird hill to die on.

If they wanted to reduce the amount of useless receipts to curb consumption, just put a tax on receipt paper at the point of manufacturing. Increase the price there, and the market will automatically use less of it. And the tax can then be used to mitigate the effects of what receipt paper is produced.

It's far, far easier to regulate a dozen (or fewer) paper companies than it is to regulate millions of retail points of sale. The same goes for plastic: If the price of a gram of plastic included mitigating the effects of producing it, the price would be higher and therefore there would be less of it. And that which exists will be less likely to be wasted.

Externalities are one place where free market theory breaks down and needs regulation. Taxing at the source puts a price on this externality as soon as it enters the market, so the market can adapt to it.

While I agree that we should focus heavily on the big stuff I really don't understand why people get so upset about this. Everything little thing helps and if people just said "yes of course we should stop that" and moved on to the nex thing, we could get so much further. It's just such a low hanging fruit to ban stupid receipts that are generally not wanted.

Other low hanging fruit examples: single use plastic bags, single use plastic plates and cups, unnesseary packaging for products, non biodegradable packaging, unnesseary lights in stores that are closed, the smallest coin size like the 1-50 cent etc etc etc. Literally everything helps so don't get upset.

If you can't handle the small changes how the hell do you handle the bigger changes that are to come.

Reading the article, it's just aimed at pointless receipts. Think paying cash for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk. You don't need paper for that. Update POS software to ask before printing.

Also, it's mostly thermal paper these days. I don't even think you can make that biodegradable and if you can there's plenty of chemicals in there you probably don't want releasing into nature. At this point it's easier to just get rid of them than to replace them with dot matrix printers again.

Email is the wrong solution as well. Nobody wants to fuck about at the till going "danny dot f underscore 32 at yahoo dot mail dot org". No operator wants to have to type that in. Half the time they'd type it wrong. I don't want them to even have my email address, because I know they'll spam the fuck out of it. I'd rather they just send a bunch of sale metadata to my credit card provider or something, so the proof of sale could be on there.

I just don't take a receipt unless it's for something that might need to go back. Equally pointless are the shops that ask if you need a receipt, but they've already printed it anyway so they just chuck it in a bin behind them.

Petty changes still matters in the big picture. Even if they were made biodegradable, there would still be emissions involved in the production of them. Also this is definitely the future anyway, since payment methods are switching to digital either way.

French fondness for all things paperwork

Another piece of evidence that French and Germans are siblings after all.