Lottery Ticket Worth $1.16M Miraculously Rescued From Six Metric Tons of Garbage

An Italian lottery player had to beat almost impossible odds twice: first by matching five winning numbers (1 in 3,478,761), then by recovering the €1 million ($1.16 million) winning ticket from a landfill after mistakenly throwing it away.

Waste workers in Bitonto, a city in Italy’s southern Puglia region, found the MillionDay ticket intact among six metric tons of garbage after tracking down the truck that had collected trash from the store where it was discarded, according to Italian news agency ANSA.

The winner, whose identity has not been disclosed, had played the same numbers for years because they were associated with a loved one.

But when that ticket was checked at the lottery retailer, the terminal displayed “non pagabile,” meaning “not payable.”

This didn’t mean the ticket wasn’t a winner, as its owner assumed. It actually meant the prize was too large for the retailer to pay over the counter. So, believing it was worthless, the customer left it behind and went home.

The player’s family later checked the result and realized their numbers had finally hit. The winner and relatives rushed back to the store, only to learn that the discarded lottery slips had already been collected with the trash.

By then, the €1 million was somewhere inside a garbage truck headed for a landfill site.

Race to Stop Compactor

SANB, which handles waste collection and transportation in Bitonto, retraced the route taken by the garbage truck and was able to identify the vehicle before its load was lost in the wider waste system.

The timing was fortunate because the collection took place on a Sunday. On a normal working day, the load might already have been lost in landfill.

The truck couldn’t just be emptied at SANB’s premises because of rules intended to prevent waste contamination. The company instead contacted another facility in the Bari area where workers could safely sort the contents.

Needle in a Haystack

The hunt ended at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday when an employee spotted the ticket inside a torn bag.

“This story is nothing short of miraculous,” he added.

Workers celebrated the discovery as though they had won themselves, as the ticket was then returned to its owner, according to multiple Italian news sources.

The BBC reported that the winner had signed an agreement promising to reimburse the costs of the recovery operation.

After handling the recovered ticket, Toscano and several workers stopped for coffee and jokingly bought a scratch card to see whether some of its luck had rubbed off.