A year ago we started a project of trying not to produce any waste for 10 days. We have learned to look for zero waste shops, go to farmers' markets and most importantly, make a meal plan for the days ahead and not create waste when we throw away leftovers. Among the waste that could not be avoided were, to a large extent, receipts. Since EET has been mandatory in our country since 2020, every retailer is obliged to print receipts, so a huge amount of them is printed daily, creating a lot of unnecessary mixed waste that cannot be recycled. So I decided to use the receipts to reduce the amount of discarded waste.
I came up with an idea to create a new board material, which consists only of receipts pressed with water. It is a simple process, which is not absolutely perfect, as it was a six-month project, I could not go into it in depth, but I tried to use a large amount of waste without adding other components to it, such as dispersion adhesives, resins and etc.
12622 receipts were used for the production of the table top, which is 6,311 kilograms of waste. My rough calculations showed that Tesco stores in the Czech Republic print 985,230,000 receipts a year. This is 492,615,000 grams of waste per year. It would be enough material for making 156 113 tables from it.
