Fredericton recycling crew finds lost wedding ring

Municipal workers in Fredericton sorting through the city's recycling made a rare find recently when they spotted a gold wedding band amid the usual array of pop cans and food containers on their conveyor belt

The ring had slipped off the finger of Kris Jardine while he was emptying his recyclable materials into a bin at one of the city's recycling drop-off sites a few weeks ago.

"I'd just got done emptying our can and plastic bags into the bin, and all of a sudden, I got back to the car, and I looked down, and I was like, 'Uh oh'," Jardine said Monday.

To his horror, Jardine realized that he had dropped his wedding band into the bin along with the pop cans.

"I started freaking right out," he said. "If someone would have walked by, they would have thought that someone had run over my foot or that I'd shot myself or something because I was just beside myself."

So, Jardine took matters into his own hands.

"I grabbed my hockey stick out of the trunk, and I started fishing around in the bin, and that didn't go so good," he said. "I mean, there had to be like a bazillion aluminum cans in there."

When that failed, he called the Fredericton Region Solid Waste Commission to ask whether they could look for his wedding band. The foreman told the workers on the line to keep an eye out for it.

"Lo and behold, not long later, it was literally laying on the belt for all to see," said commission spokesman Brad Janes. "So, one of our workers found it."

The commission gets about 12 calls about lost items every year, said Janes, but the items almost never turn up.

Jardine's case was the exception.

Jardine said he has learned his lesson, and he won't be letting the ring out of his sight again.

"I'm always walking around with my hand in a fist now and taping things up, making sure it's not going anywhere else," he said.

Jardine and his wife, Kyla, said they are going to have the ring resized to avoid further slip-ups — or slip-offs.