Apple AirTags Track 'Recycled' Plastic to Unprocessed Piles in an Open-Air Lot

'Houston resident Brandy Deason put an Apple AirTag in her recycling to see where her plastic trash was going,' writes Tom's Hardware.

'While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management.'

Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear.

That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight.

Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling — and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. 'I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem.' In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has 'applied' for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved.

CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. 'We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here,' a spokesperson answered, 'And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it.'

CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. 'So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem.'

Cyclix Project Manager: 'Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products — that's what we're trying to do!'

CBS News points out that turning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered 'recycling' by 25 states...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.