By Yoon Ja-young
After a day of shopping, all the cash in your wallet is replaced with a pile of receipts that eventually end up in the trash. While providing proof of purchase and a record to maintain a budget, paper receipts are likely to disappear soon as they evolve into smart receipts.
The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has announced the introduction of the standard smart receipt in conjunction with BC Card, KT and SK Planet.
Paper receipts are surprisingly coupled with numerous problems, including the risk of leaking private information, the waste of paper resources and other costs. Recently, reports of hormone disruptive chemicals used in printing the receipts aggravated concerns.
Credit card companies have begun implementing services to reduce the issuance of paper receipts or to substitute them but the need for setting up additional telecommunications infrastructure has hindered the expansion of the new services.
The new smart receipt technology developed by ETRI minimizes any additional costs of setting up infrastructure as it uses near-field communication (NFC) technology and shoppers with smartphones.
When making a payment, shoppers have only to move their handsets closer to the settlement device, and the receipt is issued directly on the smartphone.
“The development of smart receipt technology will take care of many disadvantages including the waste of resources such as trees and reduce private information leaks stemming from the issuance of paper receipts,” said Cho Hyun-sook, managing director at the Knowledge-based Information Security and Safety Research Department at the institute.
“The era of ‘green payments’ free from plastic credit cards, plastic membership cards, paper coupons and paper receipts has finally come to a close,” she added.
Receipts are not the only paper item losing significance. The introduction of email has reduced a huge part of paper mail and faxes. Tablets are replacing paper as well as desktop computers. SK Telecom, the country’s biggest mobile carrier, has provided its employees with tablets to set up a cloud-based paperless office. They can download documents on the tablets through cloud computing services.
Forward thinking businesses have led the transition to paperless offices. They prefer them for several reasons, including cost cutting and the security of confidential and private information of customers.
According to a 2009 survey on 30 of the country’s businesses by uPaperless Korea Forum, each of the companies was spending on average 722 million won annually on paper. They spent 57 million won to copy, 18 million won to print, and 687 million won on company documents. It means each employee used 190,000 won a year on paper.
Staff at KT, the country’s top communications company, work using iPads. Instead of printing out documents, they take only iPads to meetings. Agendas are shared through email and notes are taken on the tablet. As a result, the consumption of paper has dropped steeply. According to KT, its employees used on average 231 pieces of A4 paper each month, but it dropped by 20 percent to 188 in the first half of this year. KT expects paper consumption to decrease by 83 tons annually.
On top of saving money, the paperless office is environmentally friendly as trees won’t have to be cut down to make paper. To produce 1 million pieces of A4 paper, 100 trees 30 years or older are sacrificed. These trees absorb as much as 10 tons of carbon dioxide a year.
It also saves time. Employees have only to access the online office system to get the information they want, instead of rummaging through stacks of documents.