A €1 million lottery ticket was found in a dustbin in Italy after garbage workers helped retrieve it at taxpayer expense. The winning ticket was pulled from the rubbish in the Puglia region by local waste management crews. The winner, who has chosen to stay anonymous, only learned her ticket had been discarded after returning home from the store. A family member informed her that her usual set of numbers had won, sparking an urgent search to locate the ticket before it was lost forever.
The woman always played the same numbers, a habit tied to her memories of a loved one. When she tried to check her ticket at her local store after the draw, the machine indicated it was “non-payable”. This occurred because smaller retail outlets are unable to process large jackpot wins, only minor prize claims. This detail was not immediately clear to the woman, who initially believed her ticket was not a winner.
After the family learned the numbers had indeed won, the woman raced back to the shop, but the ticket had already been tossed in the trash and the bin collected. Frustrated, she contacted Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of SANB, a public waste management company based in Bitonto outside Bari. Toscano described the process of tracing the ticket’s path through the collection route, identifying the specific garbage truck that had picked it up. With little hope of success, they stopped the vehicle to begin the search.
Because of the potential hazards in the waste, the team transported the truck to a specialized facility for the retrieval. Waste workers combed through the load for over 24 hours, recovering multiple lottery tickets and stubs. Among the items, they found the winning ticket stub, which Toscano described as “miraculously still in one piece”. When he informed the woman that the ticket had been found, she was overcome with emotion and cried on the phone. Toscano, though he would have liked to comfort her, admitted he could only offer words through the call.
However, the recovery came with a heavy cost. As a public agency, SANB is funded by taxpayers. To ensure the costs were managed, the woman was required to sign a commitment to cover any extra expenses incurred during the search and retrieval. The gamble worked out, and the ticket was recovered, but the event highlights the unusual lengths people may go to retrieve valuable lost items.