A Canadian man dug through piles of rubbish at his local dump in a valiant, romantic - and ultimately successful - effort to find his wife's accidentally discarded wedding rings.
The story begins when Steve Van Ysseldyk and his wife of 26 years, Jeannine, brought home a bag of popcorn from the cinema and spilled it in their garden, according to BBC.
While gathering up the buttery mess, Jeannine’s rings seemingly fell into the popcorn bag which was then thrown into a compost bin.
The couple only realized the rings were missing after the compost had been collected. So, the next day, Steve travelled to the dump to begin the daunting task of searching through 18 tons of organic waste.
“I was pretty optimistic,” Steve recalled, telling the BBC he knew he had to find them because “the wife's gotta have her rings, right?”
After inspecting home CCTV footage to pinpoint the exact moment when the diamond rings were lost, he determined that his search would take him to the Mission Sanitary Landfill in British Columbia.
“My wife was very skeptical. I told her, I'll go to the dump tomorrow morning and ask [to search the facility],” he said.
“And she's like ‘they're not gonna let you’ and I was like, ‘you never know. You gotta try.’”
Armed with a shovel and a pair of gloves, he began searching through rotting grass clippings and food scraps on August 15 for traces of the movie theater popcorn.
“It was a rainy day. It wasn't very hot out,” he said, explaining that the fortuitous weather helped to “keep the stink down.”
Denny Webster, who works at the site, helped the search by using an excavator to scoop out waste.
“My brain was trying to figure out a way to tell him to go buy his wife new wedding rings,” Webster told CTV, which first reported the story.
He recalled how he watched Steve on his hands and knees in the muck. “No one in their right mind would be doing that,” he said.
Miraculously, the first ring was quickly discovered after Steve recognized some sausages that his family had thrown out with their compost.
And within an hour, both rings were found.
