An abrupt end for collectors who turned lottery ticket trash into cash

Peter Aliberti feels he was double-crossed by the lottery. It's not that the Everett construction worker had a winning ticket the state wouldn't cash. He's upset that he has collected 90,000 discarded scratch tickets, and he thinks he's due 3,600 new ones.

"That's where the injustice is," Aliberti said.

He's angry that in late April, the Massachusetts State Lottery abandoned its recycling program aimed at cleaning up the litter of discarded lottery tickets by giving away a free $1 scratch ticket for anyone turning in 25 losing stubs. He thinks the lottery owes him and others one more chance to redeem their tickets.

Lottery officials said its Instant Replay program, started nearly three years ago, spiraled out of control, costing the agency nearly $1 million a year in prize money -- or 10 times what the Legislature had appropriated for the lottery's antilitter efforts -- because people were redeeming discarded tickets by the truck load.

"I looked at the numbers, and they scared me," said Mark J. Cavanagh , the lottery's executive director. "It was time to put an end to it."

Scrounging for scratch tickets became a business of sorts for many people once the state started offering the reward. Collectors would go store to store, picking up tickets inside and out, just as many people roam streets on trash-collection days looking for bottles and cans that can be redeemed for a nickel apiece under the bottle deposit law. Some recyclers had been gathering tickets for months, and in some cases as long as a year, amassing hundreds of thousands of tickets.

The lottery sells millions of scratch tickets each year in $1, $2, $5, and $10 denominations. They account for 70 percent of the lottery's $4.5 billion in sales. Under its recycling initiative, the lottery would hand over a new book of 300 $1 scratch tickets for every 7,500 discarded tickets brought in; the agency gave out 5.1 million scratch tickets in nearly three years.

Collectors say their winnings from a book of 300 scratch tickets would range from $150 to $225. The lottery says the prize payout on all its games averages 72 cents for every dollar gambled.

A recycling company hired by the lottery accepted discarded tickets for redemption only a handful of days a year at designated sites around the state. The last one was in October, and scavengers have been waiting for the lottery to disclose the next scheduled redemption.

On redemption days, Cavanagh said some people would show up driving dump trucks and pickups full of tickets. At one event at the Hatch Shell last year, Cavanagh said, the crunch of redemptions was so great that Storrow Drive had to be closed temporarily.

As lottery revenue cooled, declining just more than 2 percent through the first 11 months of this fiscal year, the agency has responded by launching several new games and squeezing costs where possible, including the recycling program.

"It worked for the people redeeming tickets, but it didn't work for us," Cavanagh said.

Scratch ticket collectors say the lottery, with its billions of dollars in revenue, can easily afford one last ticket redemption. The collectors say they followed the rules, did the dirty work of sorting tickets into groups of 25, and now are left holding the bag.

"It's a messy, messy job," said Mario Conti of Winthrop, a retiree who started collecting losing tickets before the antilitter program began, going through discarded stubs looking for winners that had been thrown away. He said he has found nearly $15,000 in winners in the trash over the years.

Conti said the lottery's antilitter incentives made his hobby even more attractive. He said he and his wife would use the extra money to take a vacation or make some special purchase, but now he has 12 boxes in his garage holding about 90,000 losing scratch tickets that are worth 3,600 new $1 scratch tickets.

"There's a lot of people with tickets piling up in their garages," he said.

An elderly collector from Winthrop, who asked that her name not be used because she didn't want her neighbors to know she collected discarded tickets, said she had planned to redeem her 120,000 tickets -- or the equivalent of 4,800 new $1 scratch tickets -- this month.

"I've got all these tickets, and I've wasted a year of my life," she said, fighting back tears.

Richard McDonald of Revere said he and his wife amassed nearly 67,000 tickets -- worth 2,680 new $1 scratch tickets -- over the past year. He said they picked up tickets on the street and from retailers who sell them. McDonald said he suspects the program was being abused by some retailers, who had easy access to a stream of used tickets.

Officials at the Norwood-based New England Convenience Store Association, nearly all of whose Massachusetts members are lottery agents, declined to comment on the program.

Robyn Chiminiello , owner of Hub Video in South Boston, a major lottery vendor, said she did not have time to redeem tickets and had to lock her trash bins because people were scavenging for losing tickets.

Lottery officials say their antilitter focus is now on litter in general instead of scratch tickets . Cavanagh said the agency gave $10,000 to Boston Shines, a municipal cleanup event last month that gathered 350 tons of litter. Similar initiatives are in the works.

"My heart goes out to these people, but as executive director I have to do what's best for the lottery," Cavanagh said. "This is more cost-effective."

Bruce Mohl can be reached at mohl@globe.com.