A frantic anonymous woman in southern Italy has walked away with a €1 million ($1.09 million) lottery jackpot, thanks to the dedicated work of local garbage collectors who sifted through tons of waste to retrieve her accidentally discarded winning ticket.
The dramatic search unfolded in Bitonto, a small town outside Bari in the Puglia region, after a series of misunderstandings nearly cost the woman a life-changing windfall. As detailed by Roberto Nicola Toscano, administrator of local public waste management agency SANB, the winner had played the same set of numbers for years, which held personal meaning tied to a loved one. After the draw, she visited her local convenience store to check her ticket, where the shop’s terminal marked the slip as “non-payable” — a standard result for large jackpots, as small retailers are only authorized to redeem smaller prizes. Unaware of this policy, the woman assumed her ticket was a loser and threw it away before the trash was collected by SANB crews.
It was only when she returned home that a family member checked the official winning numbers and realized she had taken home the top prize. In a panic, the woman contacted SANB directly to beg for help recovering the ticket before the waste could be processed.
\“We mapped the route the ticket would have taken, and we didn’t hold out much hope — it had already been loaded onto a garbage truck, so the odds of finding it intact felt almost impossible,” Toscano told Agence France-Presse in an interview Tuesday. But a stroke of initial good fortune worked in the search team’s favor: crews were able to quickly identify the exact truck that had collected trash from the shop’s bin and pulled the vehicle over before it completed its route.
Due to health and safety risks posed by hazardous materials that can turn up in municipal waste, the truck was taken to a specialized waste processing facility equipped to support a targeted search. Over more than 24 hours, SANB workers sorted through mounds of garbage, sorting through dozens of discarded tickets and stubs before finally locating the winning slip. Toscano confirmed that the ticket was “miraculously still in one piece” when it was found, despite being mixed in with general household and commercial waste.
When Toscano called the winner with the news of the recovery, she broke down in tears of relief. “I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone,” he told reporters.
The successful recovery did come with a cost. Because SANB is a public agency, unplanned search operations would normally fall to local taxpayers to fund. Toscano said he required the winner to sign an agreement committing her to cover all additional costs incurred from the 1-day search — a small price to pay for a jackpot that has been confirmed as valid and ready for payout.