One man’s trash, another’s treasure: Collector strikes gold at landfill
A Thai recyclable garbage collector had been collecting gold accessories found in a landfill for years and this week sold them for 19,595 baht at a gold shop in the central province of Saraburi.
The owner of the gold shop, Namo, shared a video of the woman selling the gold on the shop’s Facebook page on Monday, with a caption that read…
“She asked me to check these gold accessories she and her brother collected from a trash pile.”
In the video, over 30 pieces of accessories, weighing about 2 to 3 kilogrammes, were placed on two black trays.
The woman said she wanted to know whether the items were made of real gold. She expressed confidence that some of the pieces must be genuine gold accessories that could fetch a good price.
Namo carefully separated the fake gold items from the genuine ones, one by one, using his expertise. Only 20 pieces were identified as likely to be genuine. He then tested each piece using an X-ray device. Only five were confirmed to be genuine gold accessories. Namo melted the items to determine their total weight.
When Namo asked the woman what she expected the items to be worth, she replied that she hoped for about 1,000 to 2,000 baht. To her surprise, she received 19,595 baht.
Some netizens congratulated the woman in the comments section, while others accused Namo of fabricating the story to promote his shop. Namo insisted that the video depicted a real incident and said he was equally surprised by the amount of gold.
Other netizens shared their own experiences, recounting how they had lost gold accessories and eventually given up searching for them, believing they might have ended up in a landfill.
One woman said she had once wrapped her gold ring in tissue paper and accidentally thrown it away but never searched for it.
A similar incident involving valuables in a landfill was reported in October last year. On that occasion, a Thai woman hired government officials and local garbage collectors to help her search for a diamond ring worth about 400,000 baht at a 28-hectare landfill.
The woman had removed the ring while washing her hands and accidentally thrown it away. Fortunately, she managed to recover it after 30 hours of searching.
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