Cristina Hodgson
A WOMAN has been reunited with a ring she lost in the rubbish over two years ago.
Hellen Miles, a resident of Secadero, Casares, was devastated when she accidentally tossed a ring she had bought with her first pay packet 30 years ago into the rubbish.
Miles explains that she lost this ring, a three-colour gold ring of great sentimental value, in November 2018 when she was handling rubbish bags.
“It is a ring that I bought 30 years ago with my first pay packet and it has a lot of sentimental value for me.” she said.
Not quite ready to give up hope, in March 2019 when the Costa del Sol Environmental Complex opened its Lost Property Office, Miles completed a lost property form online and provided photographs to prove ownership on the off chance she got lucky.
Astonishing, she did, and the sparkler was tracked down and now sits once more on Miles’ little finger.
“It’s just incredible that such a small piece could have been located amongst the waste from the entire Costa del Sol” she said.
Finding an object in 350,000 tonnes of waste is no easy task as Juan Luis Villalon, Councillor for Urban Solid Waste (MSW) for the Commonwealth of Municipalities of the Western Costa del Sol explains.
According to Villalon, locating an item from the waste of a home can take months as all the material thrown into the rubbish goes through several processes, and obviously not every ‘lost’ item will be found.
That said, the western Costa del Sol urban solid waste complex has machinery capable of locating items amongst more than 350,000 tonnes of waste that it annually manages at its facilities —a pioneering service in waste treatment
After remaining for eight weeks in the fermentation warehouses, the organic matter then goes to the refining warehouse where glass and small pieces of metal, such as jewellery, are often recovered, thanks to an induction separator and a large magnet.
These pieces then undergo a cleaning process and a study to determine their authenticity and value.
The company has staff trained for this task who carry out tests to determine whether the pieces are gold, silver or costume jewellery.
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