Recycling Ruse Rumbled by Tracking Device

Nurse tracked recycling 'straight to Poolbeg Incinerator'

Photo by Alberto Frías on Unsplash

If recycling isn’t real, what else might not be as it seems?

“I put the tracker in the recycling and watched it go straight to Poolbeg. By the very next morning, it had been destroyed.”

Peter Laurent put a tracker device in his carefully cleaned recycling. Tracking the device on his phone, Laurent - a nurse at St James’s Hospital in Dublin - watched the tracker travel straight to the Poolbeg incinerator.

“I was putting some recycling in the recycling bin and I thought wouldn’t it be clever if I see where it goes?” Peter told Joe Duffy’s Liveline.

He hid the tracker in some pieces of cardboard and put his recycling out for collection as normal.

“I put it in my clear bag. I buy six recycling bags and I pay about E9 for the six. I live in an apartment so I do this off my own bat. I had a bunch of these little trackers at home and I wanted to see where my recycling went,” he said.

Peter told Joe the tracking devices can be purchased in most electronic shops.

“You can buy these products in most electronic shops and place them on your keys or on your car and let’s say if it’s stolen, you can find it. This one was a gift, but in general they cost in the region of €15 or €20.”

“I put the tracker in and I watched it go. Straight to Poolbeg! By the next morning it was destroyed. Either incinerated or crushed,” he said.

“It ended up where?” Joe Duffy asked, incredulous.

“Poolbeg incinerator. That’s where my tracker died,” Peter replied.

Joe: How long between leaving your house and the death of the tracker?

Peter: I’d say within 24 hours.

Joe: And that’s where you hoped it would go?

Peter: No, I guess I would have thought it would go to a recycling facility maybe in the west of Dublin and get sorted out, where they put paper with paper and cans with cans. But no the whole bag I think just went straight to the incinerator.

Joe: Hang on, was it a recycling bag or a non-recycling bag?

Peter: It was 100 per cent a recycling bag, a clear bag, with THIS IS A RECYCLING BAG written on it.

Joe: If it was a recycling bag, it should not have ended up there?

Peter: That’s what I would assume.

Impressed by this ingenuity, Joe asked Peter, what gave him the idea?

“I get these little ideas every now and then and go with them, I just do a bit of my own investigation because we don’t hear much about waste, apart from when they tell you how much the price has increased but do we know exactly where it goes when it’s finished with?” he said.

Joe wanted to know if Peter had put trackers on anything else? The reply came – mostly bins.

Joe: And what’s your general discovery?

Peter: Generally it’s the incinerator.

Joe: Everything goes to the incinerator?

Peter: Everything yes. I’ve done four. I hide them completely. No one is going to find them.

Joe: So on four occasions you put a tracker device in your recycling bag and on four occasions your tracker was burned to death down in Poolbeg?

Peter: Yes. And I didn’t even get the ashes Joe!

The programme then heard from various listeners, one of whom is so dedicated to separating his recycling correctly that he dismantles his inhalers in order to dispose of them properly. This man told Joe that he quite enjoys the process.

By the end of the programme, Conor Walsh of the Irish Waste Management Association contacted the show to settle the issue by assuring everyone:

‘This doesn’t happen.’

“I just wanted to come on and talk about it because look, when people hear recyclables aren’t recycled, it does enormous damage to the recycling industry in Ireland. Enormous damage to Ireland’s recycling efforts. This kind of story is horrific to hear,” Conor Walsh told Joe.

Conor was curious whether the recycling bag might have stopped off at a recycling centre on the way to the incinerator?

“It went directly east to the incinerating plant in Poolbeg. I have the tracking data. It went directly to the incinerator,” Peter told him.

“The reality is, this stuff doesn’t happen,” Mr Walsh said. “Okay, there may be an isolated incident here, it has happened and I accept that evidence.”

Peter reminded him that his recycling bags had been tracked straight to Poolbeg on four separate occasions.

“Yeah, yeah, and look that’s illegal. It’s illegal for a company to collect recyclables and not take it for recycling....”

*UPDATE* 5.40pm:

In a comment posted below Conor Walsh of the IWMA said he is seeking the tracker information from RTE in order to further scrutinize what happened here.

“The waste was left in Aungier Street in the Central Commercial District where waste companies are not allowed to collect waste until the evening and late at night. By that time the incinerator is closed, so none of these vehicles go direct to the incinerator. They all go to transfer stations. I am asking RTE for the tracking evidence so that I can get to the bottom of what actually happened.”

*Thanks to those reading + supporting this work. Option to ‘buy a coffee’ here

Readers can listen back to the Liveline show here