Receipt waste in German retail

Since January 1, 2020, receipts have been a hot topic in Germany. With the introduction of the receipt mandate, every retailer in the German market has since been required to offer customers a receipt after payment. To this day, these receipts are still issued on paper – and on environmentally harmful thermal paper coated with toxic chemicals at that. We believe it is time for a digital alternative, and with anybill we want to establish a legally compliant solution to the paper clutter – above all for the sake of the environment. But how much receipt waste does German retail actually produce? On average, 23.1 billion receipts are issued every year. That is roughly 1.9 billion receipts per month. With an average receipt length of 30 cm, German retail as a whole prints 220 meters of receipts every second. That is about 1 kg of waste per second. This per-second receipt consumption is roughly comparable to twice the length of a football pitch. Every minute, 13 km of paper receipts are issued, weighing around 58 kg. Extrapolated, that makes 790 km of receipts per hour and 3.5 tonnes of thermal paper waste – the equivalent of a small delivery van or roughly the weight of an Asian elephant. In German retail alone, around 6,923,430 km of receipts are issued each year, corresponding to a weight of 30,432 tonnes. The annual weight of these receipts is roughly three times that of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Monthly receipt consumption adds up to a distance of about 576,952 km. To get even a rough sense of how many kilometers of receipts German retail issues in an average month, you would have to fly from the Earth to the Moon one and a half times. If you would rather stay on Earth, you could also walk around the equator about 14.5 times to picture one month's receipt consumption in German retail alone. anybill: an environmentally friendly solution and a digital touchpoint with customers. Paper receipts are not only a burden on the environment – they also cost German retail around €88.7 million a year, or roughly €6.7 million a month. After all, on top of the constant replacement of thermal paper rolls, the bill also includes the printer maintenance and printer replacements that keep automated receipt printing running every day. With anybill's environmentally friendly alternative, retailers in German retail can cut their receipt costs by up to 33% and additionally use the digital receipt for smart customer interactions.