Garbage workers search six tons of trash to recover woman’s $1.15 million lottery ticket

A life-changing lottery win almost ended up buried forever after one woman mistakenly threw away her winning ticket. What looked like an ordinary piece of paper soon triggered an extraordinary search involving garbage workers and tons of trash.

The incident happened in Bitonto, Puglia, Italy. The woman checked her lottery ticket at a local store. When the machine displayed a “non-payable” message, she believed it had lost and tossed it into the trash, BroBible reported. She had no idea the message meant something completely different.

Only later did her family realize that the numbers they always played, 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51, had actually won a prize worth about $1.15 million. By then, garbage collectors had already picked up the trash. The family immediately contacted the waste management company and hoped the ticket could still be recovered.

Finding a lottery ticket in six tons of garbage is no easy task

SANB waste management director Roberto Nicola Toscano told the BBC the family realized there had been a misunderstanding after checking the ticket again. The group returned to the store and learned the ticket had already been collected with the trash.

The race to recover the ticket may sound unbelievable, but it is not the first time a discarded lottery slip has sent someone searching through the trash. In an Ohio man’s missing lottery ticket story, a $100,000 prize was nearly lost forever until he went dumpster diving and managed to retrieve it. 

The recovery effort quickly became far more complicated. Workers traced the garbage truck that had collected the waste. However, it could not be unloaded at SANB’s facility because of contamination concerns. The company then contacted another facility near Bari where the load could be safely sorted.

The search lasted two days as workers carefully went through nearly six tons of garbage. That equals about 13,200 pounds of waste. Against all odds, they found the winning ticket inside a bag filled with damaged lottery tickets. The ticket’s stub was still intact.

He also revealed that if the mistake had happened on any day other than Sunday, the trash would likely have already been taken to a landfill. That timing made the recovery possible and turned an almost impossible mission into a remarkable success.

The recovery of a $1.15 million ticket from six tons of trash is already the kind of lottery story that seems too unbelievable to be true. However, in the recent past, a woman who won $15 million said she’d always known she would become a millionaire.

As for Toscano, he joked that he touched the ticket before returning it, hoping some luck would rub off. He later bought a scratch card while having coffee with coworkers and won 50 euros. He called the whole ordeal nothing short of miraculous.