Woman’s desperate search for $1.6 million lottery ticket after throwing it in the bin

A woman who accidentally threw away a $1.64 million lottery ticket has been reunited with her life-changing prize after workers spent two days digging through tonnes of rubbish to find it.

The Italian woman, who has chosen to remain anonymous, believed her ticket was worthless after taking it to a lottery outlet in the town of Bitonto in the southern Italian region of Puglia.

The shop’s terminal returned the message “non-payable” and she assumed it meant she hadn’t won.

Instead, it meant exactly the opposite — the prize was so large that it could not be paid out in-store.

Unaware of her incredible luck, the woman tossed the ticket into the rubbish before heading home.

Only later when she checked the winning numbers did she realise that her regular picks — 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 — had landed her the jackpot.

She raced back to the shop, only to learn the rubbish had already been collected.

Refusing to give up, she contacted the local waste collection company and offered to pay for a search.

Roberto Nicola Toscano, administrator of waste company SANB, said workers painstakingly retraced the ticket’s journey despite having little hope of finding it.

“We reconstructed the journey of the ticket, without much hope of finding it as it had already been picked up by a garbage truck,” he said.

After identifying the correct truck, it was taken to a specialist facility where workers could safely sift through the waste, which included potentially hazardous material.

Two days later, against all odds, the ticket was found intact.

Mr Toscano said the woman burst into tears when he rang with the news.

“I would have hugged her but we were on the phone,” he said.