World's first carbon offsetting lottery launches in the UK!
20 Apr, 2011
Carbon Lottery calculates your emissions, and offers £2 offset tickets and a chance to win 4m euros!. Do you feel lucky?
A new Carbon Lottery offering businesses and individuals a chance of scooping a weekly £3.5m jackpot while offsetting emissions is to be launched at the end of the month.
The idea of the web-based game is to drive green behaviour change while "giving people something to talk about and look forward to", according to developer Gregor Paterson-Jones of South African investment house Sterling Waterford.
Players choose their numbers online, before calculating their carbon footprint. They are then told how many lottery tickets they can buy to offset their personal emissions. Each £2 ticket is worth 500kg of CO2, which means that the average UK resident would have to buy two tickets a week to live a "carbon neutral lifestyle".
A quarter of each ticket price goes directly to carbon saving projects in the developing world, which must comply with the Gold Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
A study published earlier this week found that just 0.1 per cent of emissions from the UK's 100 largest firms were being voluntarily offset, which suggests that a new model is needed, Paterson-Jones told BusinessGreen.
"There are two problems with the voluntary [offsetting] market: not that many people are offsetting; and there's not a well understood brand in the market," he said. "What we've created is an alternative incentive - a monetary incentive - and a well understood format."
Paterson-Jones is targeting consumers who might regularly play the National Lottery, but also companies such as airlines or car rentals which he envisages offsetting part of their emissions through the scheme and handing out tickets to employees as incentives.
The UK is a test market for the new lottery which, if successful, is likely to be rolled out in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Switzerland.
Paterson-Jones fully expects the brand to grow beyond the early adopters and interested parties who may be already offsetting their emissions, and is confident that the range of emission reduction projects benefiting from the lottery will be similarly expanded.
"The challenges are signing our first large B2B deals - we hope to have six to 10 within 18 months - and in terms of marketing, inserting the brand into the minds of concerned citizens," he said.
"Over the next year or so it's likely we'll buy into a forestry project, a reforestation project. I expect we'll see, in the next year or so, forestry projects coming to the fore."
The Carbon Lottery goes live on 27 April.
By Will Nichols 'BusinessGreen', 20 Apr 2011