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Out of that $80 billion in sales, Scratch-off tickets made up 61% of sales and was the primary growth driver in the US. People in the US spent approximately $80 billion on state lotteries (Isidore, 2017) and $60 billion in combined commercial and Native American casinos (Marotta et al., 2017) in 2016. Lottery Scratch-off tickets are paper-based, pre-printed games with fixed odds typically sold in a retail location, while E-Instants are online versions sold via a mobile app or computer website.
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This research looked at the environmental impacts of the most prevalent form of US gaming, Scratch-off tickets, compared to its likely future replacement, legal online electronic instant scratch-off tickets (E-Instants) to complement current social product assessment models. We need to expand the gaming industry’s assessment focus to include environmental impacts, which arguably affects more of the world’s population than the 2.2% of problem gamblers in the United States (US) adult population (National Council on Problem Gambling, 2018).
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A public health perspective should include environmental impacts and the associated human health risks however, this has not been the case for gaming in the US. The existing field of research has argued that legal gambling should be viewed as a toxin from a public health perspective (Shaffer, LaBrie, & LaPlante, 2004). Advocates and researchers of problem gambling are actively changing their approach to understand all “gambling-related harms” but have yet to identify environmental impacts as an important human health risk. Abstract The gaming (i.e., gambling) industry currently does not include environmental impacts in its assessment of new products.