Waste workers help find binned €1m lottery ticket in Italy

BBC World NewsUpdated Aug 5, 2026, 12:33 PM

The player only realised he binned the life-changing ticket after family told him the numbers he played for years had been drawn.

A lottery player who accidentally binned a €1m (£857,158) winning-ticket may be the luckiest man in Italy after refuse workers found the missing slip.

The anonymous player disposed of the ticket in a shop in Bitonto, southern Italy, after checking his numbers and being told it was "non-payable".

The man only realised he threw away a winning ticket after a relative pointed out the numbers he always played had been drawn.

It sparked a two-day search through a "mountain of waste" which had been collected by a bin lorry, the head of the refuse company, Roberto Nicola Toscano, told Italian news agency Ansa.

"This story is nothing short of miraculous," he added.

Recounting the story, he said the mix-up happened because the "non-payable" message appears when the prize is too high to be paid out by the shop.

When the player returned home, his family reportedly pointed out his favourite numbers - 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 - had been drawn.

"It was then that he realised the misunderstanding. So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one our operators," said Toscano, director of SANB who handles waste collection in the area.

After the player made contact with the refuse company, the bin lorry was located before its contents were compacted for disposal.

"Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill," the boss told Italian broadcaster TGCOM24.

The truck was then escorted to a special site where the search began to find the "small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste".

Finally after a two-day search, the winning ticket was reportedly found by a waste worker on Tuesday morning.

"It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones," Toscano told Ansa.

The cost of the recovery operation is set to be charged to the winner, who had previously signed a declaration promising to cover the costs associated with the search.

The luck even rubbed off when Toscano and his colleagues bought a scratch card as a joke. They won €50 (£43).