Handy Device
An environmentalist put a GPS tracker in with her recycling to see where it ended up — and the results were not confidence-inspiring.
As Inside Climate News reports in an investigative collaboration with CBS, Houston activist and avid recycler Brandy Deason tossed an Apple Tag in with her bagged plastic waste to take to one of the city’s new recycling drop-off sites to see what really happens to recyclables.
Deason dropped her secretly-tagged plastic bag off with the Houston Recycling Collaboration, a public-private partnership that launched with the help of Exxon nearly two years ago to address the city’s low recycling rates. Though the program was partially billed as being capable of melting any plastic down for reuse chemically, ICN and CBS found with the help of Deason that no such process has occurred in the 20 months since the project first began.
In fact, the sorting plant that’s supposed to enact the so-called “advanced recycling” process still hasn’t opened — and won’t do so until the middle of next year.
“We want to know what was happening with this stuff,” Deason, a member of the Houston Air Alliance, told the website. “Is it really going to go to get recycled?”
Plastic Scenery
As the activist, her organization, and the news outlets soon found, the tagged bags instead ended up at Wright Waste Management, a remote facility 20 miles outside of the city’s downtown. Though its reporters were not allowed a look inside, drone footage from above the plant shows that it’s home to a giant open-air pile of trash.
Despite not having opened the promised sorting facility, the Houston Recycling Collaboration also expanded its drop-off locations from one to eight, which seems per this new investigation to be steering exponentially more plastics to the glorified landfill at the Wright plant.
Beyond the disingenuousness of expanding a recycling program that isn’t recycling as advertised, experts who spoke to ICN note said that storing plastic waste in the Texas head can pose a fire hazard.
In fact, as a documents request filed by the news outlets revealed, the facility failed fire marshal inspections three times between July 2023 and April 2024. In those inspections, fire officials found that the plant was missing permits related to the storage of hazardous and combustible materials.
As part of her activism, Deason limits her own plastic use — and she was appalled to learn where her unavoidable plastic waste ended up.
“Should that catch fire, the emissions coming off of that could be really poisonous to the people that live around here,” she told ICN, “not to mention a dangerous, large fire like that could spread into a neighborhood.”
More on plastic nightmares: Scientists Found Microplastics in Every Human Semen Sample They Examined
