OUR CAMPAIGN
Don't Take That Receipt! is a public health and environmental justice group in Western Massachusetts. Our mission is to educate vulnerable populations - those who work in stores and restaurants - and the general public, about the presence of bisphenol-A (BPA) and bisphenol-S (BPS) in receipts. We provide tips and assistance to cashiers, managers, and business leaders for reducing exposure and creating systemic changes that benefit the health of workers and customers. Our adult-youth collaboration created the humorous educational video, This Will Change How You Shop Forever, that spawned the organization’s work.
News Media
Store-To-Store Outreach
Social Media
We have garnered regional and statewide print, radio, television, podcast, and online media coverage of our campaign and video, and how to reduce exposure.
We were featured on Radioplasma, a wonderful podcast by Iohann Rashi Vega about everything Holyoke. Listen Here!
Local reporter Natalia Muñoz of Holyoke Media also created this informative short video from our media event, featuring most of our staff and also Dr. Laura Vandenberg of UMass Amherst.
Natalia Muñoz is like our biggest fan! She also interviewed us for her WHMP radio show, Vaya Con Muñoz! Part 2 is airing soon.
The MetroWest Daily News covered our joint advocacy work to encourage TJX (parent company of TJMaxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and Sierra Trading Post) to adopt a safer chemicals policy.
Our Partners, Funding, and Fiscal Sponsorship
Our regional store outreach focuses on face-to-face conversations with cashiers and store and restaurant managers. Our team has outreached in Holyoke, Massachusetts and throughout our Western Mass region. We've provided bilingual tip-cards to cashiers and managers, and tracked and evaluated tangible steps that are taken to make employees and stores safer.
While our team is doing this store to store outreach in our own state, we provide printable tips cards for cashiers and managers, free of charge for anyone to do this same outreach anywhere in the US and beyond!
Through our online outreach, we aim to reach tens of thousands of views of the video across our state and nation-wide.
We are strategically reaching out to Massachusetts-based nonprofits, environmental health groups, businesses, unions, schools, activists, cashiers, fast food workers, healthcare professionals, bank tellers, librarians, and customers, as they have a vested interest in understanding and sharing this information.
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
Local media such as Western Mass News and the Holyoke Sun covered our media event.
Susan Eastwood wrote some great letters to the editor, published in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Willimantic, CT Chronicle!
Our online outreach in collaboration with our partners will also focus on national corporations. Through our joint efforts with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, Ecology Center, Green America, Clean Water Action, and Mamavation we are engaging the public to sign petitions and share social media messages to encourage target companies to switch to phenol-free receipts and paperless POS technology. An early adopter of these better protocols, in response to this group pressure, is Trader Joe’s, which also has nearly 20 stores across MA.
Don’t Take That Receipt! is a proud sponsored project of Filmmakers Collaborative. Our outreach campaign is so thankful to our funders, the Toxics Use Reduction Institute, The Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice, and the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund. We are able to provide summer youth jobs through a grant from the Massachusetts Attorney General Healthy Summer Jobs fund as well as through our partnership with CareerPoint in Holyoke.