Million-Euro Lottery Ticket Recovered from Garbage Truck in Italy

A lottery ticket worth one million euros was recovered from a garbage truck in Italy after the distraught winner contacted the sanitation department for help. Sanitation workers scanned the truck's contents and, after digging through waste for over a day, miraculously found the ticket still intact.

The incident occurred on Sunday in the Puglia region of southern Italy. The winner had checked her ticket at a local shop, but when she inserted it into the machine, it displayed a message stating the ticket was "not redeemable." She assumed this meant she had not won, whereas in reality, the message appeared because the prize was too large for small retailers to pay out.

Roberto Nicola Toscano, director of the Puglia public sanitation company SANB, explained that the anonymous winner always played the same numbers, which were associated with a loved one. Upon returning home, a family member informed her that her numbers had indeed won, but by the time she rushed back to the shop, the trash had already been collected.

"We reconstructed the route of the ticket and we did not have much hope of finding it, because it had already been collected by a garbage truck," Toscano said.

Despite the odds, the company's staff managed to identify the correct truck. Given the potential hazards within the waste, the vehicle was taken to a specialized facility equipped for such complex searches. After more than 24 hours of sorting through old stubs and refuse, workers finally located the winning ticket.

When Toscano informed the winner that the ticket had been found, she wept with relief. The operation did not come without a cost; as SANB is a public company, Toscano required the woman to sign a commitment to cover all additional expenses incurred during the search—a gamble that certainly paid off for her.