Waste employees dig through six metric tons of garbage for two days

By Kate Northrop

BITONTO, Italy — An Italian woman who accidentally threw out a winning €1 million (US$1,155,580) winning lottery ticket is probably one of the luckiest players alive after trash collectors were able to sift through tons of garbage and find the discarded slip of paper still intact.

Waste employees gave one Italian woman a second chance at becoming a millionaire after they graciously dug through mounds of trash to find a €1 million winning lottery ticket she mistakenly disposed of.

The anonymous player's misfortune (or fortune) began when she checked her ticket at a tobacco store in Bitonto, a historic town in southeastern Italy, where the scanner told her it was "non-playable." She threw it out at the shop.

But a relative later alerted her to the winning numbers in the draw — 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 — which she recognized as the ones she associated with a loved one and always played.

"It was then that they realized the misunderstanding," Roberto Nicola Toscano, Director of waste collection company SANB, told Italian media outlet Ansa. "So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our operators."

Toscano explained that his trash collection company handles all the waste in the local area. Since the trash had already been picked up by the time they realized their error, it prompted a massive undertaking of digging through a six-metric ton "mountain of waste" that lasted two days.

"This story is nothing short of miraculous," Toscano remarked.

He figured that the "non-payable" message appeared on the ticket scanner screen because the prize was too large to be paid out by the retailer.

What made the lottery winner even luckier was the timing of her actions. Although the trash had already been collected, she got in touch with the collection company before the contents were dumped into the compactor for permanent disposal. By retracing steps, they were able to narrow down the ticket's possible location to one garbage truck.

"Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill," Toscano said to Italian broadcaster TGCOM24. "Once we located the compactor, we isolated it and placed it under armed guard."

The truck containing the contents from the store was directed to an isolated location where they would be able to sift through the heaps of trash for one, little ticket, until finally they pulled out a "small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste."

They discovered several other discarded tickets throughout the process, but on a Tuesday morning at around 5:30 a.m., the employees cheered when the one in question was finally found.

"It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones," Toscano said in an interview with Ansa.

The winner was crying "with emotion" when Toscano called her with the good news. He "would have hugged her," had they not been on the phone. He and the other workers "touched the lucky ticket in the hope that it might bring us some luck, too."

Funnily enough, Toscano and his employees decided to buy a scratch-off ticket as a humorous nod to the ordeal and collectively won a €50 prize.

Since SANB is a public agency, taxpayers would have been responsible for the cost of the search, but the winner signed a contract stating she'd agree to pay for the search costs associated with the recovery operation. Toscano declined to reveal any identifying information about the winner to BBC News when asked.