Family Accidentally Throws Away $25,000 in the Garbage

A waste collection agency in Ohio recovered $25,000 accidentally thrown into the garbage by a local family before it could be transported to landfill.

On Wednesday July 28, Republic Services, a solid waste collection agency in the city of Oberlin in Ohio, received a frantic call from one of their customers telling them that she had lost something important in the garbage, ABC News 5 reported on Wednesday.

"It turned out to be $25,000," Republic Services operations supervisor Gary Capan told the local outlet. "They were cleaning out their house for their grandmother and they cleaned out the refrigerator, threw out all the garbage, grabbed all the freezer stuff and put it in a bag."

Capan added that the grandmother then asked her family: "'Hey, there's an envelope with $25,000 in there, don't lose that,' and she's like, 'Grandma, I already lost that, it's in the garbage!'"

After being notified of the situation, staff members at Republic Services immediately got to work to try and locate the missing money, with one set of employees attempting to track down the driver of the truck to find out if he had made it to the landfill.

Capan explained that the search would have been over if the truck driver had reached the landfill before they could be contacted.

"What happens when they get to the landfill is, they will come in, they'll drop off their load of garbage, the bulldozers will immediately start smoothing it out, pushing it into the hill, dropping dirt on it and start covering up the process of the landfill," Capan said. "And we do that in a nonstop process. If it got dropped there, there's no finding it anymore."

However, Capan revealed that the truck driver confirmed to the team that he had not yet reached the landfill, and the employees arranged with him to have the garbage dropped off at the Republic Services recycling center so that they could search through it.

Dan Schoewe, the operations manager at the recycling center, found the cash after the garbage was dropped off while he was searching through the rubbish alongside nine other workers.

"Couldn't believe it took 10 minutes and actually, I said, 'man, it looks just like that,' pulled it off, opened it up and there was the package inside with the money. They were so happy, they were tearing up," Schoewe told ABC News 5.

He added that members of the Republic Services team often find missing items, but said that the $25,000 was the "biggest" he had seen at the center "in 30 years."

Although a find of that size is rare, money is often accidentally thrown away in the trash, which a man discovered in Miami in June when he found a dumpster stuffed full of cash.

However, despite there being wads of green 50 notes of the Venezuelan bolivar fuerte in the dumpster, the man, Lennart Ochoa revealed they were virtually worthless as the country switched its currency to the soberano in 2018.

A man in Wales accidentally threw away a currency of a different kind in 2013, when he dumped a computer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, which was worth around $4 million at the time.

Newsweek has contacted Republic Services for comment.