Recycling plant worker finds $16K in trashed safe

One man's trash really is another man's treasure. Just ask the Norwegian man who works at a recycling plant and found thousands of dollars in a safe someone had thrown out.

According to Norway's VG News, 22-year-old John Erik Tveitdal is an excavator operator at a recycling facility, and one day he noticed a safe that had been dumped at the site. He told the paper, "'Suppose there is a million in there,' I joked to a colleague, but I never thought there would be any money in a safe someone had thrown away."

So at the end of his shift, Tveitdal decided to find out. He used his excavator, and managed to rip off the front of the safe. Inside were six bags of cash with a total of 117,000 kroner, or $16,000.

The recycling plant worker admits his first thought was to use the money for a vacation with his wife, but ultimately the safe's original owner was tracked down and the money was returned.

And this isn't the first time money has been found at a dump. Back in 2012, a Massachusetts man found $20,000 inside of a hollowed out book. The man says he tried to find the original owner.