S7507 landed in the New York State Senate on April 21, 2025, another attempt by Senator Pete Harckham to make paper receipts something customers have to ask for rather than something that prints automatically. Penalties under the bill top out at $20 per incident with a $300 annual cap, roughly what a case of thermal receipt rolls costs from a midrange distributor. S6090, S771, and S7940 all died there without advancing. Harckham’s 40th District runs through Ossining, Croton-on-Hudson, Briarcliff Manor, Peekskill, Cortlandt, and Yorktown. Mostly independents, mostly small restaurants, maybe three dozen transactions on a Tuesday afternoon in a given corridor. The findings section puts U.S. receipt paper consumption at 12.4 million trees and 13.2 billion gallons of water per year, citing Green America and the Ecology Center. Green America revised those estimates in its 2022 Skip the Slip update. The updated figures put the tree figure at about 3.6 million and the water at over 10 billion gallons. Legislative counsel drafts tend to grab whatever advocacy stat is circulating at the time, and updating the findings section after the source publishes new numbers is apparently not part of the process.
Skip the Slip, the receipt waste campaign that Green America launched in 2017, has accumulated enough data at this point to be a legitimate reference even if the press releases occasionally lean into the drama. According to the campaign’s latest numbers, the greenhouse gas output from U.S. receipt production alone is equivalent to putting more than 471000 cars on the road. Paper consumption runs to about 613000 short tons a year, producing somewhere around 334 million pounds of solid waste. For the study that eventually ran in Environmental Pollution in 2023, the Ecology Center collected 571 receipts from retailers across 24 states and put them through infrared spectroscopy, finding BPS on about 80% of receipts from major chains versus 84% five years earlier. BPA had dropped below 1% by 2022. Alternatives that avoid bisphenols entirely increased from 5% to 16%. The part that got almost no press coverage was the size gap in who switched to what. Best Buy was one of the first to adopt Pergafast 201, a developer chemical outside the bisphenol class, and the other large nationals eventually followed with their own formulations. Nobody in the store would have known the difference. The Ecology Center’s 2022 data had that gap still open, roughly the same as it was in 2017. Coating formulation is just not something that comes up when a shop owner is comparing prices on a case of receipt rolls from two different suppliers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi HiTec Paper put through a 10% global price increase on all thermal grades effective April 2026 because of pulp and freight costs, on top of years of supply pressure from antidumping investigations that the U.S. International Trade Commission had been running on imports from Germany, Japan, Korea, and Spain.
The CVS saga is probably the most documented version of this transition. Across all 10000 locations, the company switched to receipt paper with no phenol coatings. Then, in April 2022 added a prompt at every register giving customers the options to choose between printed, digital, or nothing. By August 2022, the prompt had eliminated about 87 million yards of paper. About 7.3 million ExtraCare members were already on digital receipts at that point. A sandwich shop on Main Street in Tarrytown or a gift store along Broadway in Sleepy Hollow processes maybe a dozen transactions before noon on a Wednesday and does not have an ExtraCare equivalent to funnel email collection through. Receipt generators like myreceiptmaker.com show a version of this gap in their usage data. Smaller operators consistently trail on both paper chemistry and digital adoption, though the sample is limited to people who sought out a receipt formatting tool in the first place. Customers at a small shop with no loyalty program generally do not expect to be asked for an email address at checkout. Most shop owners know that. A Green America survey put consumer interest in digital receipts at 86%, but the survey did not ask whether those same people would actually type their phone number into a card reader at a deli counter at lunchtime.
California’s version of this legislation, AB 1347, passed the Assembly in 2023 under Assemblymember Phil Ting and would have taken effect in January 2026. It died in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill had exempted businesses making under $2 million and only applied to those covered by the California Consumer Privacy Act, so businesses with over $25 million in annual revenue. The California Chamber of Commerce opposed it partly on retail theft grounds, arguing that stores using receipt checks at exits would lose a theft prevention tool if customers could opt out of getting a paper receipt in the first place. Several retailers in Westchester County do the same thing during evening hours when loss prevention staffing is thinnest. Connecticut, Illinois, and the EU have banned BPA specifically in receipt coatings, and France’s waste reduction law made paper receipts available only by request starting January 2023, but full legislation covering all receipt paper regardless of coating and requiring customers to ask for a printout has not actually passed anywhere in the United States. New York City’s existing consumer protection rules already require businesses to offer a receipt for purchases over $20 and provide one on request between $5 and $20, administered by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and restaurants serving food for consumption on the premises are exempt entirely.
Under Harckham’s bill, any business taking credit or debit card counts, with health care providers carved out. The bill includes a preemption clause that would override Westchester County or any municipal receipt ordinance with one statewide framework. The January 2028 date gives about two and a half years for the transition, assuming it passes at all. Three dead predecessors in the same committee suggest the odds are not great. The thermal paper market globally is worth something like $4.2 to $5.2 billion as of 2025. Almost all of the recent growth has come from logistics labels and shipping rather than receipts, a segment that keeps shrinking in developed economies. Peekskill, Cortlandt, the towns along that stretch of the Hudson Valley, the shift off thermal printing follows equipment failure more than policy. The six or seven year old Epson TM or Star TSP finally dies. The amended version of the bill, S7507A, went back into committee.
