Waste workers trawl through rubbish mountain to find binned €1,000,000 lottery ticket

A lottery player was lucky twice after throwing away a €1 million winning ticket and finding it again.

The lucky winner had discarded their ticket, believing it to be worthless, after buying it at a shop in Bitonto in the southern Italian region of Puglia.

In reality, it had hit the jackpot with the €1 million (£857,158) win, but due to a misunderstanding, the player threw it away.

But the anonymous player had second thoughts after their relative alerted them to the fact that the numbers they always picked were the winning combination.

Their regular numbers were 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51, the BBC reported.

The winner then tracked their lucky ticket to a lorry which had taken it to a waste site.

Waste workers miraculously struck gold after two days trawling through a huge rubbish heap.

The shop where the player had originally bought the ticket had told him it was ‘non-payable’.

While they believed that to mean he hadn’t won a prize this time, it actually meant his winnings were too large to be processed by the shop.

In another stroke of good fortune, as it was a Sunday, the rubbish had not yet been taken to landfill.

It took until Tuesday for a worker to finally find the piece of paper among the mountain of waste.

Nicola Roberto Toscano, the head of waste management firm North Bari Environmental Services (SANB), said the card had been found with other discarded tickets in a plastic bag.

He explained: ‘Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill.’

Mr Toscano and his colleagues went out and bought a scratch card to celebrate and won £50.

He wrote on his Facebook: ‘It is often said that waste can be a resource. Well.. there are those that have decided to take this so literally.’

However, despite becoming a millionaire overnight, the lucky winner will now have to stump up the cost of recovering their ticket.

In the UK, winning Lotto tickets go unclaimed each year.

Last week, the National Lottery put out a call for winners of two £1,000,000 Lotto tickets played in Cheshire East and Tameside.

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