Waste workers at a sorting facility in southern Italy have recovered a €1 million ($A1.6 million) lottery ticket after spending hours sifting through bags of rubbish, reuniting the winning slip with its owner who had thrown it away believing it was worthless.

How a million-euro lottery ticket ended up in the bin

The ticket belonged to a woman from Bitonto, a town in Italy's southeastern region, who left it behind at a lottery outlet after staff there marked it "not payable." Assuming she had not won anything, she walked away — unaware that the "not payable" status had nothing to do with the validity of her ticket.

According to the head of local waste management company SANB, Roberto Nicola Toscano, the ticket had simply been flagged because the €1 million prize was too large a sum for the outlet to pay out directly. It was only once the woman and her family returned home that they understood what the marking actually meant — and by then, the ticket had already been discarded and collected with the rubbish.

Hours of searching through a rubbish lorry pays off

Once the family raised the alarm, Toscano said his team moved quickly. Staff traced the route of the refuse lorry that had collected rubbish from the lottery outlet, then began the painstaking task of manually sorting through the lorry's contents at a waste sorting facility.

The search stretched on for hours. Finally, at around 5.30am, a worker found the lottery ticket — still intact — tucked inside a torn rubbish bag alongside numerous other damaged lottery slips.

"There's something wonderful about this story," Toscano said, reflecting on the outcome.

The ticket was returned to its rightful owner, who can now claim her $A1.6 million prize through the appropriate channels — a remarkable ending to what could easily have been a costly mistake.

The story has drawn widespread attention as a rare example of good fortune compounded by extraordinary effort — and a timely reminder to always double-check a lottery ticket before throwing it away, no matter what a retailer's terminal might indicate.