LotteryFootprint

     BC Lottery Corp has 500 employees and contractors at its headquarters in Kamloops and are planning an increase of 250 more. More infrastructure, bigger footprint. Consider the whole footprint of the lottery business, the throw away lottery tickets, the manufacturing and distribution of tickets, sales equipment and maintenance, advertising of tickets, and of course the extraction of resources for all materials consumed, that also adds to the foot print. Transportation for all the workers involved is no small footprint when you add in sales clerks, loggers, truckers, pulp mill workers, miners, steel fabricators, rubber plantations, oil refinerys, all play a part in the making of one lottery ticket that promises a win but guarantees a loss. One lottery ticket is not a big environmental crisis, a little paper, maybe plastic or a little aluminum, some ink, but when you add up daily sales across the globe for just this innocent lottery ticket you are now looking daily at a mile long train, a clear cut forest that would take you all day to walk around, a pulp and paper mill, a glue factory and chemical plant, fifty rail cars of chemicals, and five hundred more of fossil fuels. I am making these figures up and they may be low, but what is important to understand that little things become big things when millions of people do them. We can talk also about the social costs of gambling, and addictions, there are many sad stories yet untold. 

     So, why do we have Lotteries. Money, to make money, there really is no other reason for Government to be in the business but to get extra revenues, they say in BC that money made is for all the good things like hospitals, Sports Equipment for schools, charities etc, but in fact only one dollar in a hundred spend on lottery tickets actually gets spent on causes which are chosen by the Lottery Commission, and it seems that commission is now going to spend those revenues on expansion. They may have good intentions, like raising more to fund projects addressing global warming,  one dollar to repair every hundred dollars of damage done, when will they ever learn, the easiest mess to clean up is the one you do not make. 

     And is the real value of a ticket? Nothing. Just turns assets, resources, into a liability, garbage, and in the process picks the pockets of poor people and fills the pockets of legalized organized crime. Good to be on the right side of the law. 

     How do we stop this giant footprint?  STOP BUYING ONE LOTTERY TICKET AND GET ON EVERY BODYS CASE THAT DOES. End the insanity, save the world. Dig in.