Woman Drops AirTag in Recycling to See if Plastics Are Actually Recycled [Video]

A Texas environmentalist curious about the fate of her city’s recycling had her suspicions confirmed after she dropped AirTags in with her plastics to see what happened to them after they were picked up.

Brandy Deason, a climate justice coordinator for Air Alliance Houston—a nonprofit devoted to reducing the public health impacts from air pollution—said she was wary of Houston’s new “chemical recycling” program, which lists certain types of hard-to-recycle plastic, like Styrofoam, as acceptable.

“People do care, and they do a lot to try to sort through [recyclables],” Deason told Newsweek on Monday. “This is not an issue of it’s our fault. This is an issue of overproduction of things that are known not to be recyclable in the plastics industry.”

Deason’s AirTag-enabled investigation found that nearly every bag that she put a tracker in ended up pinging her from a waste-handling business 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston called …