An American woman used Apple Airtags to track her trash and check if her city’s recycling promises were being kept. None of the plastic collected over the past two years has actually been recycled.
An unusual use of Airtags d’Apple. As reported by Tomshardware, Houston, Texas resident Brandy Deason placed Airtags in her recycling bags to see where her plastic waste went after it was picked up. Indeed, Apple’s tool allows you to track an object remotely with the iPhone’s Find My app.
Waste far from being recycled
Her goal was clear: track her trash and see if her city’s recycling promises were being kept. The city of Houston, where Deason lives, claims to recycle a plethora of plastics, including many hard-to-recycle plastics like Styrofoam. Those promises, which seemed too good to be true, quickly alerted Deason.
The American discovered through Airtag tracking that the vast majority of the bags in which she placed an Apple tag did not end up in a recycling center. Of the 12 Airtags placed in separate bags, nine were sent to an open-air landfill alongside millions of other pieces of waste. In a video filmed by a drone of CBSwe can see piles of untreated plastic waste stacked more than three meters high.
The storage facility actually belongs to a company that is supposed to recycle plastics for the city. The problem is that its application for certification to recycle plastics is still under review by regulators, two years after the program was launched. As a result, the plastic is piling up.
250 tons of plastic accumulated
After Brandy Deason and CBS’s investigation, Mark Wilfalk, Houston’s chief solid waste officer, admitted to the American media outlet that the city has collected 250 tons of plastic since the end of 2022, none of which has yet been recycled.
“We’re going to store it for now. We’ll see what happens,” he told US media outlet Newsweek.
For its part, the company claims to need a large stock of plastic for processing from the start of its operations, which is why it would let all the waste accumulate.
This is not the first time that Airtags have been misused. Last August, a woman used the tags to identify thieves of her mail.
