At the beginning of the year, Loto-Québec unveiled a lottery ticket printed on an entirely recycled medium. With this Evasion scratch-off game, the Quebec government corporation became the first lottery company in the world to market this type of ticket.
Until now, Loto-Québec's scratch cards have contained no more than 35% recycled material, because making a 100% recycled ticket poses technical difficulties that Quebec paper manufacturer Rolland has identified. "Because the lottery must be designed in such a way that it is impossible to know in advance whether an entry is a winner or not, the medium used must be extremely stable, so that the ink level remains the same from one ticket to the next." says Loto-Québec.
In order to obtain a stable support, Rolland recomposed the cardboard with cleaned fibers. Two years of development were necessary to create this material.
Game tickets are printed at the highly secure Scientific Games facility in Montreal. Scientific Games has 240 employees and prints approximately seven billion lottery tickets per year, representing just over 10% of the global market.
Like all Loto-Québec games, Evasion tickets are printed with water-based inks and are recyclable. And the government corporation has favoured short circuits: the recycled material from the Fibres Sustana plant in Lévis, Quebec, is transformed into cardboard by the Rolland company.
However, we regret that there is no environmental comparison between tickets made of virgin fibers and those made of recycled paper, but the technical prowess remains remarkable.
