Waste workers help find binned €1m lottery ticket in Italy
The player only realised he binned the life-changing ticket after family told him the numbers he played for years had been drawn.
Italian sanitation workers have unearthed a €1 million (£857,158) lottery ticket that was mistakenly discarded, making its anonymous owner potentially Italy's most fortunate individual.
The player had binned the winning slip at a shop in Bitonto, southern Italy, after an initial check indicated it was "non-payable." The error was only discovered when a relative pointed out that the player's usual numbers had been drawn.
This realization triggered a two-day search through a "mountain of waste" collected by a refuse truck, according to Roberto Nicola Toscano, head of the waste management company, who described the incident to Italian news agency Ansa as "nothing short of miraculous."
Toscano explained that the "non-payable" message appears when a prize exceeds the amount a shop can disburse. Upon returning home, the player's family reportedly noted that his preferred numbers—2, 4, 8, 10, and 51—had been drawn.
"It was then that he realised the misunderstanding. So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one our operators," said Toscano, director of SANB, the company responsible for waste collection in the area.
After the player contacted SANB, the bin lorry was located before its contents could be compacted for disposal. "Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill," Toscano informed Italian broadcaster TGCOM24.
The truck was then taken to a specialized site, where the painstaking search for the "small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste" commenced. On Tuesday morning, after two days of searching, a waste worker reportedly found the winning ticket.
"It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones," Toscano told Ansa.
The winner, who had previously signed a declaration agreeing to cover the expenses, will be charged for the recovery operation. In a humorous twist, Toscano and his colleagues purchased a scratch card as a joke and won €50 (£43).