Refuse collectors in Italy helped a woman recover her €1 million lottery ticket after she mistakenly trashed it in the bin, thinking she had not won.

The jackpot winner, who chose to be anonymous, had consistently played the same set of numbers because the digits were related to her loved ones and held meaning for her.

Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of the SANB company in Italy’s Puglia region, said he was contacted to help retrieve the ticket.

According to Mr Toscano, the woman wanted to check her winnings or losses on Sunday when the machine displayed a “non-payable” message, which meant smaller retailers weren’t equipped to make such enormous payments. But the woman did not know at the time.

She dumped the ticket in the trash can and returned home, where a family member informed her that her regular lottery numbers won the jackpot.

“The winner always played the same numbers, as they were associated with a loved one,” Mr Toscano said.

Frantic, she hurried to the store and discovered the refuse had been collected. She contacted Mr Toscano, who was the administrator of the garbage collection company.

He made the lottery winner sign an agreement to pay all expenses incurred during the search, whether she found the ticket or not. The woman agreed and appended her signature on the document.

Mr Toscano then tracked the refuse and identified the lorry that collected the garbage from the store.

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

The administrator was able to identify the garbage truck that picked up the refuse. The lorry was dropped off at another company equipped to handle it safely and sort refuse due to potential hazardous waste that may be in the garbage.

The search lasted more than a day, but the ticket was eventually found still looking intact.

“Among them was the stub we were looking for, which was miraculously still in one piece,” Mr Toscano said, adding that the winner “cried with emotion”.

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