LitterLotto

Georgian Bay Forever has always functioned to protect the Georgian Bay waters and ecosystem from harm. One of the biggest threats that Georgian Bay and the global environment face is pollution, which is why our educational and community-based programming has focused heavily on identifying actionable ways to reduce the amount of litter in nature and change people’s behaviour when it comes to littering.

And there is no doubt that people’s behaviour needs to change. We have collected an average of around 1,000 pounds of trash from Georgian Bay beaches over the last three years during our Shoreline Cleanup. Most of that garbage constituted cigarette butts and single-use plastic items. Even amid a global environmental conservation crisis, people still casually throw away their garbage in natural public spaces. For that reason, we were thrilled to partner with LitterLotto and promote their free-to-play lottery, which allows users to enter submissions for sponsored prizes and weekly jackpots.

We love LitterLotto because it works on many levels to achieve the worthy goal of reducing pollution and changing the way people think about litter in the long term. The chance to win incentivizes people to clean up public litter and have fun doing it, while simultaneously modifying how people perceive the commonplace litter around them. One of the major issues we face is that people don’t always think of their minor actions, like flicking a cigarette butt onto the ground, as a problem. Likewise, many people have grown so used to seeing litter on the ground and in water, that they stop noticing it. We hope that by promoting this app, we will contribute to the awareness of litter, and encourage a proactive response to getting rid of it.