Can you recycle receipts?
It depends
It depends which kind you have, and most people never check. Ordinary printed receipts are paper. Thermal receipts, the slick ones that mark when you scratch them, carry a bisphenol coating, and the agency that tested them says keep those out of recycling and compost alike.
Follow it down the line
Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.
The material · Sometimes
Is the material recyclable?
Two different products come out of a till and only one of them is paper in the useful sense. A thermal receipt has no ink on it. The paper is coated with a chemical developer that darkens under the print head, and that developer has been bisphenol A or its substitute bisphenol S. When Minnesota's pollution control agency tested receipt paper from 19 hospitality businesses, every thermal sample contained one or the other. Telling them apart is easy once you know the test: thermal paper is thin, with a slick feel or a sheen, and it discolors when you scratch it with a coin or a paperclip. Plain bond paper, where ink is actually applied, is not of concern. The chemistry is on its way out, slowly and unevenly. Washington became the first state to restrict intentionally added bisphenols in thermal paper, effective 1 January 2026, which changes what gets printed there from now on and does nothing about the receipt already in your coat pocket.
Sources: Minnesota Pollution Control Agency: BPA and BPS in thermal paper, Washington State Department of Ecology: safer products compliance and reporting
The facility · No
Will a sorting facility recover it?
The concern is not that a receipt jams anything. It is that the coating travels. Minnesota's study went looking for the pathway rather than assuming it, and found it: a sample taken from a recycled paperboard producer that accepts mixed paper as feedstock, thermal receipts included, contained BPA at 0.12 mg per square centimeter and BPS at 0.053, two and three orders of magnitude below the levels in the receipts themselves but plainly present. The control is what makes it convincing. Recycled copy paper from producers who do not take mixed paper as feedstock showed no BPA or BPS above reporting limits at all. Same recycled fiber, different inputs, different result. So a thermal receipt in the paper stream is not destroyed by pulping; a small share of what is on it ends up in the next product, which in the case of paperboard is often food packaging. That study is from 2014 and its authors are careful about what it can support, but nobody has published anything since that makes the pathway look less real.
Your curbside program · Varies
Will your curbside program take it?
Here is the awkward part, and it is worth saying plainly rather than pretending the guidance is settled. Many programs do not distinguish the two kinds of receipt at all. Napa's instruction is a single line, that paper receipts go in the recycling, with no mention of thermal paper, followed by a suggestion to take email receipts instead. A state pollution agency that has actually tested the material says the opposite for the thermal kind: keep it out of recycling and out of compost. Both are honestly meant. The program is describing a paper category and the agency is describing a coating, and no household sorting instruction reconciles them. If you want the cautious answer, it is the agency's: do the scratch test, put anything slick and heat-marked in the trash, and recycle the ones that are genuinely printed paper.
Source: Napa Recycling: paper receipts
What you need to do
- Do the scratch test with a coin or paperclip. A dark line means thermal
- Keep thermal receipts out of the compost as well as the recycling
- Recycle the ones that are genuinely printed on bond paper
- Where you cannot tell and cannot check, the cautious call is the trash
Where else it can go
Decline the receipt
The only route that solves it rather than sorting it, and the one the pollution agency itself is primarily promoting. Email and text receipts sidestep the coating question entirely.
Keep the paper one where you may need to return the item or claim the expense. A receipt that does its job is not waste.
The trash, for thermal
For anything that passes the scratch test this is the recommended destination, and it is a rare case of the landfill being the responsible choice.
Recycle the genuinely printed ones
Bond paper receipts, the ones with real ink, are ordinary paper and belong with it.
Long thin strips are also small, so a receipt is near the bottom of the size range a sorting line handles well.
Common mistakes
- Treating all receipts as paper. The slick ones are a coated product with no ink on them at all
- Composting receipts, which the same agency advises against for the same reason
- Assuming the bisphenol question is solved because one state has acted. Washington's restriction starts in 2026 and applies to Washington
- Assuming your program has thought about this. Several publish a one-line answer that does not mention thermal paper
- Worrying about the paper while ignoring the simpler fix, which is not taking one