After two days of searching, a winning €1 million lottery ticket that had been mistakenly thrown away was recovered intact amid six tonnes of rubbish on Tuesday in Bitonto, near Bari in southern Italy’s Puglia region.
Roberto Nicola Toscano, the director of Sanb, a company responsible for waste collection in the region, told the story to the Italian news agency ANSA.
The anonymous winner had discarded the ticket at a local tobacconist after a self-service lottery terminal displayed the message “not payable.”
Under the rules of the lottery, retailers can only pay out smaller prizes directly. Larger winnings must be claimed through a different process, so winning tickets for substantial amounts are marked “not payable” at the shop.
According to Toscano, the player realised what had happened after they returned home, when a relative recognised the winning sequence of numbers, a combination they always played.
The family rushed back to the tobacconist, only to discover that the binned tickets had already been taken away by a waste collection crew.
“That was the start of the race to recover it,” Toscano said.
After being contacted by the family, Sanb staff were able to identify the correct lorry and stopped it before its contents were emptied into a waste compactor.
“Once we located the compactor, we isolated it and placed it under armed guard,” Toscano told TgCom24.
Workers then began searching through six tonnes of rubbish for the missing ticket.
At around 5:30 am, one of the workers finally found it.
“It was inside a torn bag with other damaged tickets. This one was one of the few that was still intact,” Toscano said, adding that he “touched the lucky ticket in the hope that it might bring us some luck too.”
And apparently, it did.
“The team and I stopped for a coffee and, just for fun, bought a scratchcard,” he said. “We ended up winning €50.”
Toscano added that the cost of the recovery operation will be billed to the winner, who had previously signed an agreement accepting responsibility for the additional expenses involved in the search.