A man has won $10,000 in a US lottery after recovering two tickets he had thrown in the bin.

AP reports that Cedric Jackson, of Rome, Georgia, asked a store clerk to throw away two tickets he had bought on Saturday, thinking he had come just short of a $5,000 prize on each. 

Realising later that he had in fact thrown away the winning numbers, he returned to the store and began digging through rubbish in a dumpster outside. 

The effort was fruitless, but later that day store employee Ricky Singh remembered the tickets had been thrown in a waste paper basket inside the store.

He called Jackson, who then arrived to claim the tickets he had mistakenly disposed of.