Description: I’ve often wondered where our recycling goes once it leaves homes in various Canadian communities. There are many horror stories worldwide (see this story by the BBC here as just one example), with municipalities signing contracts with a third-party (often the cheapest bidder), third-party who then collects the carefully-sorted recycling and unceremoniously ends up dumping it thousand of kilometres away in jurisdictions or countries where a blind eye is turned on the practice.
To know for sure what happens, I decided to put Apple’s latest surveillance tool to good use (rather than all the bad uses – here and here as a few examples). I bought a pack of 4 Airtags and decided to place them into a few communities’ recycling programmes. It helped that I was just about to travel to a few different provinces around the same time, so I placed one in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, one in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and 2 in Ottawa, Ontario.
RESULTS TO DATE:
While it was fun to do this, one by one the Airtags fairly quickly stopped communicating with my devices. The first one in Ottawa stopped communicating almost immediately after being picked up by the recycling truck, sign that the compressor likely squished it / damaged it right away. I put a second one in on the following garbage day, and that one made it all the way to the Ottawa recycling facility, as did the ones in Corner Brook and Halifax (see photos and details below).
That said, all 4 Airtags stopped communicating about a week after initially pinging back. This could be for a number of reasons; 1) and most likely the more likely rasons – they eventually got compressed and were damaged; 2) they are still sitting in a pile of recycling and there is no Apple device close by for them to communicate with / ping back to me; 3) the devices got damaged in a different way, perhaps they were left in the rain, etc.
In any case, it’s been about 6 months now since the last contact, so it seems that the experiment did not succeed; one might need a different device than the Apple Airtag in order to track recycling in this way.
On a final note, while initially I did not feel too badly about knowingly adding electronics into the recycling pile (feeling like I was doing something good for the world overall), the fact that these did not work out at all have since made me not feel great about the whole thing. Hence openly-sharing the results, in case other folks have the same idea and perhaps advising them to try a different tracking technology (perhaps this subscription-based one?).
Trial Balloon 1: Corner Brook, NL
- 1. Apple Airtag placed on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 in a can of tuna
- Airtag given extra protection and disguise using a double lid
- Airtag placed in recycling bags and taken away on Thursday, July 28, 2022
- Airtag re-emerged on Saturday, July 30, 2022 at the Wild Cove Waste Disposal Site near Irishtown, NL
- Airtag emerged again on Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at the Scotia Recycling Centre in Corner Brook, NL
Trial Balloon 2: Halifax, Nova Scotia
- Apple Airtag placed on Sunday, July 24, 2022 in a can of tuna
- Airtag placed in recycling bag and taken away on Wednesday, August 3, 2022
- Airtag re-emerged on Thursday, August 4, 2022 at the Halifax Regional Municipality Materials Recovery Facility
Trial Balloon 3: Ottawa, Ontario
- Apple Airtag placed on Tuesday, August 2, 2022 in a can of chickpeas
- Airtag given extra protection and disguise using a double lid
- Airtag placed in municipal recycling blue bin and taken away on Friday, August 5, 2022
- Airtag has not yet reemerged (as of August 18, 2022) – we suspect it was squashed/damaged in the recycling truck compactor when it was picked up.
Trial Balloon 4: Ottawa, Ontario
- Apple Airtag placed on Tuesday, August 2, 2022 in a plastic medicine bottle
- Airtag placed in municipal recycling blue bin and taken away on Thursday, Aug 18, 2022
- Airtag first re-emerged the same day Thursday, August 18, 2022 at Metro Waste Paper Recovery Inc / Cascades Recovery+ in Ottawa’s east end
