The player only realised he binned the life-changing ticket after family told him the numbers he played for years had been drawn.

A lottery player who accidentally binned a €1m (£857,158) winning-ticket may be the luckiest man in Italy after refuse workers found the missing slip. The anonymous player disposed of the ticket in a shop in Bitonto, southern Italy, after checking his numbers and being told it was "non-payable". The man only realised he threw away a winning ticket after a relative pointed out the numbers he always played had been drawn. It sparked a two-day search through a "mountain of waste" which had been collected by a bin lorry, the head of the refuse company, Roberto Nicola Toscano, told Italian news agency Ansa. Recounting the story, he said the mix-up happened because the "non-payable" message appears when the prize is too high to be paid out by the shop. When the player returned home, his family reportedly pointed out his favourite numbers - 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 - had been drawn. "It was then that he realised the misunderstanding. So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one our operators," said Toscano, director of SANB who handles waste collection in the area. After the player made contact with the refuse company, the bin lorry was located before its contents were compacted for disposal.