Waste workers recover €1m winning lottery ticket thrown in bin in Italy
A lottery player who threw away a €1m winning ticket in southern Italy had it recovered by waste workers after a two-day search. The player had mistaken a 'non-payable' message for a losing ticket.
Workers at a waste collection company in Bitonto, southern Italy, have retrieved a winning lottery ticket worth €1 million that had been accidentally thrown away. The remarkable find came after a two-day search through collected rubbish.
The anonymous player had checked his numbers at a shop and was told the ticket was 'non-payable'. According to Roberto Nicola Toscano, head of the local waste firm SANB, this message appears when a prize is too large for the shop to pay out. The man apparently misunderstood and disposed of the ticket.
After returning home, a relative pointed out that his usual numbers – 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 – had been drawn. Realizing the mistake, the player and his family went back to the shop, only to discover the tickets had already been collected by a waste operator.
Toscano said the bin lorry was located before its contents were compacted. 'Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill,' he told Italian media. The truck was taken to a special facility, where the search began for a 'small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste'.
On Tuesday morning, a waste worker found the ticket in a perforated bag along with other damaged tickets; it was one of the few intact ones. The cost of the recovery operation will be charged to the winner, who had signed a declaration to cover the expenses.
In a lighter twist, Toscano and his colleagues bought a scratch card as a joke and won €50.
