Aprovince of Bari trash company, Snab, said it has managed to recover a winning one-million-euro lottery ticket and return it to the owner after it was accidentally thrown away.
    Snab Director Roberto Nicola Toscano told ANSA that it was a "miraculous story," explaining that the person had played their usual numbers in an instant lottery and did not realize they had won because the machine in the outlet gave a message saying 'not payable'.
    The reason for the message is that big wins are not paid directly at the outlets the tickets are bought at.
    Not realizing this, the person left the ticket behind at the outlet.
    But when they returned home, family members pointed out that the numbers they always played had come out.
    The person rushed back to the outlet, but by that time the ticket had been thrown away and the trash collected by Snab "And so the recovery operation began," said Toscano.
    The company retraced the entire handling process, from the moment of collection right up to the point of delivery into a compactor.
    "Once we located the vehicle, another snag arose: it couldn't be emptied at our facility due to the risk of waste contamination," said Toscano.
    "We contacted a company in the Bari area that could enable us to sort through the load, and we started searching in the morning".
    He said the million-euro ticket was found in the early hours of Tuesday, one of the few still in tact in a bag fill of ruined tickets.
    Toscano said he touched the winning ticket before returning it to the owner hoping it would give him some good luck and then bought a scratch-card over a coffee with some members of his team.
    "The result was we took home 50 euros," he said.

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