Recycling Lottery Tickets
The other day I saw someone get into trouble with a traffic warden for tossing a losing lottery scratchcard at a litter bin, missing by roughly two feet and then attempting to walk away without rectifying his mistake. He got away with an informal warning after quickly deciding that it made sense to pick the scratchcard up and put it in the bin the old-fashioned way. There was nothing particularly dramatic about this event, but it did make me wonder if we might be able to do something more useful with old lottery tickets than simply contributing to landfill problems.
Of course, we always have the option of recycling waste paper (and in some parts of the UK it isn't an option but a law) but since I enjoy thinking about all things lottery and have a weekly blog to write, it made sense for me to try and come up with more creative uses for these tiny scraps of paper and cardboard. Here are my top five ideas:
Post Its - Okay, so they're pink instead of yellow and they already have numbers and text printed all over them, but old lottery tickets are ideal for keeping in the dashboard of the car with a black marker for noting down those phone numbers and car registrations that tend to need remembering at the least convenient times.
Bookmarks - Another thing that never seems to be around when you want one is the humble bookmark. Scratchcards are better for this than regular lottery tickets, but in the heat of the moment when you don't want to lose your page, details like that don't tend to matter.
Modern Art - I'd be willing to bet a week's pay that it won't be long before an artist with a lottery grant decides to use old lottery tickets to create some artistic statement about the lottery itself. And if they don't I may give it a crack personally. Can't be that difficult, surely...
Okay, so maybe there are better things to do with old lottery tickets that I haven't thought about, but I'll leave you to dwell on that. For now, if you're worried about climate change, global warming and everything else that Al Gore likes to talk about, consider buying tickets for consecutive weeks (so that you only get one piece of paper instead of eight) and recycle them when you're done.
Article Last Updated: 24/07/2007 14:56:20
