Imagine the moment when you realize your entire life savings—stuffed in a shoebox—is gone. Not misplaced. Not under the bed. Gone, packed up with the recycling and carted off like last week’s Amazon boxes. You call the city, and it’s bad news: that box is history, loaded onto a truck, off to a different state, and probably turned into pulp by now. Twenty-three thousand dollars—poof.

In a world full of digital transactions and cryptocurrency, some people still prefer cold hard cash. Sure, it’s risky, but if you’re buying a barn find car from Craigslist, or haggling at a flea market, nothing beats cash in hand. Except when it ends up at the bottom of a mountain of other people’s cardboard and junk mail. Then? It’s gone, and you’re fresh out of luck.

This nightmare became reality for an Oregon man who had scrimped and saved $23k in cash to buy his dream RV. And when I say scrimped, I mean this guy sold everything. The truck, the old RV, maybe even the kitchen sink. He gathered his cash—nothing fancy, just a neat stack of bills—and tucked it away in an old Vans shoebox, figuring it was safe.

Then Thursday, August 1st rolled around. Recycling day. The man later joked his family members are “good recyclers.” So his wife, doing her civic duty, gathered up the recycling and dumped it in the bin. And yeah, you can probably guess what happened next: she accidentally tossed the shoebox full of cash along with the junk mail. Oof.

By the time they realized their $23k mistake, the recycling truck was long gone. And the local company, Recology, doesn’t mess around. They had already shipped the recycling over 200 miles, across state lines to Samoa, California, where it was scheduled to be sorted.

The Oregon man got on the horn with Linda Wise, general manager at the Humboldt County Recology plant. Now, Linda doesn’t sugarcoat things, and the outlook was grim. The box had likely been compressed for transport. “It’s probably squished up somewhere,” Wise said. Not what you want to hear when your life savings is in the mix.

And that’s not the worst of it. One truckload carried 22 tons of material, and Recology sees multiple trucks coming in every day. They go through 100 tons daily. This guy’s crushed box of cash? Yeah, the outlook was not good. “We take quite a bit of material every day, so the odds of finding that are not much better than a needle in a haystack,” Wise explained.

By the time Wise got the call on Friday, they’d already sorted most of the recycling. A good chunk of what was left had been shipped to a landfill. The clock was ticking. They had only a few bags of recycling from Oregon left to go through. Still, Wise gave the order: all employees were to be on the lookout for the missing cash.

Enter Nick Page, a guy just doing his job on the line, pulling out cardboard for recycling. Then he spots something strange. “I was working on the line, pulling off cardboard to be recycled when I suddenly saw some big stacks of $20 bills.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was sweating it out on a recycling line and saw thousands of dollars rolling past me, I’d be tempted. “Honestly, it’s probably the largest amount of money I’ve ever personally gotten to handle,” Page said. Yet instead of pocketing it or making a scene, Nick did the right thing.

“He calmly put it all together … and walked it to his boss, and said ‘Here’s the money that guy was looking for,'” Wise confirmed. Talk about integrity.

When the crew sat down to count the mess of money, they found that only $320 had been lost in the whole ordeal. Out of $23k, just a couple hundred bucks were gone. Not bad, considering the odds.

“Everyone’s consensus was it was the right thing to do,” Wise said. “Everybody was beaming, just happy that they were able to do something like that for him.”

The Oregon man was over the moon when he got the call. He immediately jumped in his car and drove four hours south to pick up his cash. According to Wise, the guy was “happy as could be.” Can’t blame him.

Now, here’s the cherry on top: the man tried to leave a reward for the plant employees. But Wise wouldn’t allow it. “We’ll do something nice for our employees. I’m trying to think of something cool for them. I’m proud of them,” she said.

And that’s the kind of feel-good ending we all need, right? You start off thinking this poor guy is out $23k, the kind of money most of us only dream of holding in our hands. But thanks to a team of honest recyclers—and a little bit of luck—he walked away nearly whole. Just goes to show, while sometimes cash is king, honesty is always priceless.