An Italian lottery player has been reunited with his €1million (£857,000) winning ticket after refuse workers spent two days searching through a mountain of rubbish to find it. The anonymous winner, from Bitonto in southern Italy, mistakenly binned the ticket after taking it to a local shop to check whether it had won.
How the Ticket Was Lost
When the shop's lottery terminal displayed the message "non-payable", the player assumed the ticket was worthless and threw it into a bin before leaving. However, the message actually meant the prize was too large to be paid out in-store.
The blunder only came to light when the man returned home and a relative pointed out that his regular numbers – 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 – had all been drawn. Realising what had happened, the family rushed back to the shop, only to discover the ticket had already been collected by refuse workers.
The Search Operation
The frantic search prompted the intervention of waste collection company SANB, whose director, Roberto Nicola Toscano, described the remarkable recovery as "nothing short of miraculous". Explaining how events unfolded, Toscano said: "They all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our operators."
Fortunately for the winner, the refuse lorry carrying the rubbish had not yet emptied its load. "Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill," Toscano told Italian broadcaster TGCOM24.
The vehicle was diverted to a special facility where workers began painstakingly searching through what Toscano described as "a mountain of waste" in the hope of finding the tiny slip of paper. After two days of sifting through rubbish, one refuse worker finally spotted the winning ticket on Tuesday morning.
Recovery and Aftermath
"It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets," Toscano told Italian news agency Ansa. "This was one of the few intact ones." Workers reportedly celebrated the discovery as though they had won the jackpot themselves.
The operation is expected to come at a cost for the lucky winner, who signed a declaration agreeing to pay the expenses involved in recovering the ticket. Even the recovery team enjoyed a slice of good fortune. After the successful search, Toscano and his colleagues jokingly bought a scratch card to celebrate – and ended up winning €50 (£43).
