What to Do With Your Used Lottery Tickets

What to Do With Your Used Lottery Tickets

A lottery ticket is a prized possession, an investment of dreams that will hopefully bring you millions of pounds, euros, or dollars. It is astounding how much you can treasure and safe-keep one small piece of paper. And rightly so, because this one small scrap of seemingly insignificant paper (and the numbers that it represents) can become worth an untold fortune. So we hold onto it like gold until the time of the lottery draw. But what happens to our used lottery tickets once the lottery draw has come and gone?

image

We all know what to do if we have a match on all the numbers and your ticket is a winner. There are clear guidelines for that, sign your ticket, keep it in a safe place, and when you’re ready to claim your prize, go to your local official lottery office with the ticket. Or if you are the lucky winner of a smaller prize, you simply need to take your winning ticket to any local store that is registered to sell those particular lottery tickets. If you like to frequently play the lottery, you may also like to play a few casino games at some points too, especially if you are feeling lucky. If this sounds like you, then playing bingo for cash might just be in your wheelhouse, unless the lottery is the only thing calling your name at the moment. However, it is always good to expand your horizons.

But what happens when the lottery draw comes and goes and now you have a ticket that is not worth any money? Instead of simply throwing it in the garbage, here are some creative ways you can re-use this previously treasured possession, saving it from the shame of the trash can! Even old lottery tickets have their uses.

Lottery Tickets Make Great Bookmarks

No more losing your place or bending your book spine. Use your old lottery tickets as bookmarks! Not only do you get to preserve your place and keep your book as good as new, but, as a bonus, you will be reminded to buy your next lottery ticket every time you read your book.
Think Green and Recycle!

The plain old paper lottery tickets are recyclable, so you can simply throw them into your nearest recycling bin. If you are not sure whether or not your lottery ticket is eco-friendly, you can even just check the back of the ticket for a recycling symbol. A further test, in the not-so-clear cases, is to tear the ticket and check what is inside. If there is no plastic or foil inside, you can recycle it. Scratch-card lottery tickets generally are made up of paper, plastic, and foil so these are not recyclable. Some states even have recycling programs to collect lottery tickets to be recycled, to save you the hassle.

Kids Will Love Them Too

The lottery may be restricted to players 18 years of age and up, but there is nothing stopping your kids from having fun with your old lottery tickets. The scratch-card type of lottery tickets make excellent credit cards for pretend play, and there is no doubt that any imaginative child can find many other uses for old lottery tickets too. You could even hand it to your child for ‘safe-keeping’ and he or she will feel very important! Get a collection going and your budding artists will have lots of art supplies to make some really creative and unusual art projects.

Lottery Tickets as an Art Form

Art comes in many forms and renowned artists Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was have found an inventive way to turn used lottery tickets into a form of art. One of their most famous works of art is a Hummer “Dream Car” which they constructed out of $39,000 worth of lotto tickets. This is not their only lotto ticket artwork. Under the name “Ghost of a Dream” , these two genius sculptors create life-size, elaborate sculptures, depicting luxury items, out of old and abandoned lotto tickets. They rescue these littered tickets from all over the world, and their sculptures symbolize the realization of these discarded lottery dreams. Now that is poetic justice.

“We kept finding these lost lottery tickets littered all over the ground and we started picking them up thinking they were someone’s lost wish; that they were this hope and dream that they had and then they tossed it away. We started thinking about what those dreams actually meant and what happens if you collected enough of those to make that dream into a reality.” – Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was

Online Lottery Tickets are Timeless

If you buy your lottery tickets online, you do not even need to think about what you will do with your used ticket. Hopefully, it will be a winner, and you will get to exchange it for lots of money! However, for the times when you do not get a number match, it is very convenient that your lottery ticket is safely stored online, in your playing account. This means that not only do you not need to worry about keeping it safe until the lottery draw, but you also do not need to worry about getting rid of your old lottery tickets.

theLotter buys the actual lottery ticket on your behalf, through our one of our many local offices. We then scan the ticket and upload it into your online account. Your ticket is then locked away in our local office safe until the draw. If it is a winner, you will be notified and your ticket will be used to claim your money. This is just another reason why buying lottery tickets online is the convenient and hassle-free way to play the lottery!

Catherine Avatar