LitterLotto - get rewarded for binning litter

by Startacus Admin

The lowdown on LitterLotto, the social good startup enabling users to win prizes for simply picking up litter.

In the UK alone, 2 million pieces of litter are thrown on the ground every day - that’s 23 per second. We wrote some time ago about the economic cost of cleaning gum off the streets, and cleaning up litter is no different, with the taxpayer shelling out more than £1 billion per year for street cleaning. On top of this, there is the obvious environmental problem with throwing litter around, most of which doesn’t decompose, or breaks down and leaches toxic chemicals into the ground, or contributes to microplastics in the water, etc. So as well as steps like making more packaging biodegradable, what else can be done about the littering problem?

UK-based social good startup LitterLotto is helping combat the issue with a free monthly prize draw. Users simply open the app and take a picture of every piece of litter that they pick up and throw into a bin, and every photo they take is an entry into the prize draw. Currently the monthly jackpot is £10,000 - though this depends on where in the world you are using the app - and there are other prizes to be won as well. Users get extra entries for recommending the app to other people, and if one of those people wins, you will also get a prize.

We have seen plenty of times in the past how gamification helps people in all sorts of ways, whether it’s learning or keeping up exercise routines or, now, cleaning up their surroundings. And when our surroundings contain more than 4 trillion cigarette butts every year, there’s a lot of opportunities for winning a prize just for being conscientious!

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Published on: 20th December 2021