A South Carolina woman nearly recycled something extremely valuable last month when she threw the material into a trash can at a recycling plant in Greenville.
Public works workers spent hours searching through piles of recycled materials to find the ring and safely returned it to her on January 28th.
The woman, Melanie Harper, emailed the city the night before to say she lost the ring at the recycling center on Rutherford Road.
“I know the chances of finding this are slim to none,” she wrote. “However, if your ring is found during the recycling process, we would appreciate it if you could contact us.”
Travis Golden maintains roads for the Department of Public Works, keeping them clear and picking up roadside trash.
He is the one who made the discovery.
“It was a pretty big mountain,” he told USA TODAY Thursday afternoon. “You wouldn’t expect to find a ring in that big old pile…We kind of found two fake rings in the pile before we found the real one.”
Find a lost ring in a pile of recycled items
Jeff Hammond, Greenville’s solid waste supervisor, called supervisors in the morning to make sure the trash cans were kept out of the landfill.
Instead, they instructed workers to dump the trash cans on the ground so they could search for them in the pile. They searched for several hours.
