Dropping one of Apple's GPS AirTags into the trash may seem like a major error, but it could be key to unlocking the false, climate-forward promises of city leaders and corporations.
Earlier this year, Brandy Deason, a Texas resident and climate justice coordinator for Air Alliance Houston, began dropping the small devices into every bag of recycling she dropped off for the city of Houston's new "all plastic accepted" program. The AirTags pinged at a nearby storage facility, nowhere close to where they were expected to be, and certainly were not superheated, chemically treated, or mechanically chopped up, as the program claimed.
A further co-investigation by CBS and Inside Climate News uncovered hundreds of thousands of pounds of yet-to-be recycled plastic waste upon visiting the waste-handling business, known as Wright Waste Management. The piles of garbage weren't just being abandoned, however, the tons of recycling are waiting for a promised overhaul of the city's recycling program, backed by ExxonMobile.
Houston unveiled the Houston Recycling Collaboration in 2022, in response to low recycling rates of single use and hard-to-recycle plastics, offering a "revolutionary" new way of repurposing the materials. Exxon and other Big Oil players have proposed such "advanced" or "chemical" recycling as a solution to accumulating plastic runoff, with the potential to turn plastic into fuel.
Local environmental activists were immediately wary of the universal promises made by such a recycling effort, and the potential environmental harm caused by what is essentially mass incineration of plastic material. Local environmental watchdog groups have been tracking plastics through the system ever since. City storage locations and plastic sorting plants are reportedly falling behind, failing safety inspections, or fully nonoperational, CBS reported. Wright Waste Management denied CBS's request for comment.
Despite privacy and safety concerns — and their potential appeal to police forces — users have embraced Apple's accessible live tracking tech, and this certainly isn't the first instance of AirTags being used for environmental investigations.
In 2023, several organizations and news outlets — including Reuters, ABC, and CBS local affiliates — used AirTags to fact check the recycling claims of city programs and major industry players, including petrochemical giant Dow Inc. Inside Climate News first published an exposé on Wright Waste Management and Houston's recycling failures in 2023, noting the use of electronic tracking devices by local group The Last Beach Cleanup.
