NYC woman gets help from sanitation crew to locate lost rings

It all started when a 34-year-old New York City woman was preparing a meatloaf for U.S. thanksgiving and removed three of her rings to avoid getting them dirty.

Placing them on a paper towel next to her sink, she went about her busy day and continued getting dinner ready for her family.

The woman was so preoccupied with the task at hand that she never even noticed when the paper towel holding the rings, which included both her wedding and engagement bands, was mistakenly thrown straight into the garbage bin.

Finally realizing what had happened the next day, she contacted the city’s sanitation department in a desperate bid to try and locate her missing rings, the New York Daily News reported.

Fortunately for the woman, the sanitation worker responsible for the route past her Manhattan apartment had yet to empty his truck for that day. Hearing the woman’s story, the New Jersey trash-transfer station crew agreed to delay dumping the garbage truck until she could come search through it the following Monday.

But with a combined total of 13 imperial tons of garbage from across the neighbourhood sitting inside the truck, finding the missing rings certainly wasn’t going to be an easy task. And that’s why the woman, known only by her first name, Melissa, came prepared with three relatives all outfitted in protective gear and ready to sift through more than 200 bags of trash to find her misplaced property.

“I have never seen anyone that organized,” sanitation department supervisor Louis Guglielmetti said in the New York Daily News article, last updated on Nov. 30. Guglielmetti pitched in with his fellow co-workers to help find the rings.

Eventually, after two hours of looking through rubbish, the search was over and the missing jewelry was finally found. As it turns out, it was another piece of Melissa’s property found inside the trash bags that helped the search team narrow its efforts to locate the rings.

“We always encourage people to recycle, but there was junk mail in the trash,” Guglielmetti said. “That’s how we found them.”