Living the Lie

I’ve been told for ages that recycling is a total scam. I read recently that there have been hundreds of civilian experiments where everyday Joes (and some investigative groups) put GPS trackers in recycling bins to see where the crap actually ends up. Invariably, it does not go where we are told it goes. Rather, it ends up in landfills, incinerators, or even shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, where it’s often dumped or burned instead of recycled. For instance, a 2023 ABC News investigation placed dozens of GPS trackers in plastic recycling bags across the U.S., finding that many were simply trashed in landfills, with less than 10% of global plastic waste actually getting recycled according to UN data.

Similarly, Greenpeace’s 2022 Plastic Recycling Investigation used trackers on items from major retailers like Walmart and Target, revealing that much of the “recycled” plastic from U.S. households was exported and ended up in illegal dumpsites abroad. In San Diego, a CBS 8 viewer experiment in 2024 taped an Apple AirTag to a plastic bottle, only to watch it journey straight to a local landfill within hours. And the Basel Action Network has tracked e-waste recyclables since 2014, showing that many end up in toxic export markets rather than being responsibly processed.