A Canadian man dug through piles of rubbish at his local dump in a valiant, romantic - and ultimately successful - effort to find his wife's accidentally discarded wedding rings.

The story begins when Steve Van Ysseldyk and his wife of 26 years, Jeannine, brought home a bag of popcorn from the cinema and spilled it in their garden.

While gathering up the buttery mess, Mrs Van Ysseldyk's rings seemingly fell into the popcorn bag, which was then thrown into a compost bin.

The couple only realised the rings were missing after the compost had been collected. So, the next day, Mr Van Ysseldyk travelled to the dump to begin the daunting task of searching through 18 tonnes of organic waste.

"I was pretty optimistic," Mr Van Ysseldyk recalled, telling the BBC he knew he had to find them because "the wife's gotta have her rings, right?"

After inspecting home CCTV footage to pinpoint the exact moment when the diamond rings were lost, he determined that his search would take him to the Mission Sanitary Landfill in British Columbia.

"My wife was very sceptical. I told her, I'll go to the dump tomorrow morning and ask [to search the facility]," he said.

"And she's like 'they're not gonna let you' and I was like, 'you never know. You gotta try'."

Armed with a shovel and a pair of gloves, he began searching through rotting grass clippings and food scraps on 15 August for traces of the movie theatre popcorn.

"It was a rainy day. It wasn't very hot out," he said, explaining that the fortuitous weather helped to "keep the stink down".

Denny Webster, who works at the site, helped the search by using an excavator to scoop out waste.

"My brain was trying to figure out a way to tell him to go buy his wife new wedding rings," Mr Webster told CTV, which first reported the story.

He recalled how he watched Mr Van Ysseldyk on his hands and knees in the muck. "No one in their right mind would be doing that," he said.

Miraculously, the first ring was quickly discovered after Mr Van Ysseldyk recognised some sausages that his family had thrown out with their compost.

And within an hour, both rings were found.

He called his wife, who at the time was shopping for a metal detector to help with the hunt, and she immediately broke down in tears.

"Lots of people are amazed by the story. I'm amazed equally as well," Mr Van Ysseldyk told the BBC, adding: "You go in with all the hopes and you do what you can."

Mrs Van Ysseldyk meanwhile, said the incident had made their marriage stronger.

"I know how much he loves me, that he's willing to go through a rotten, stinky compost pile," she told CTV with a laugh.