- Someone put an airtag in a pair of sneakers and donated it to a charity
- The shoes ended up traveling 800 km across Europe
- This experience shows exactly what can happen to your given clothes
When you give clothes to a charitable organization, do you really know where they finish? In most cases, you don’t do it, but a Tiktok user decided to discover it by showing a pair of sneakers with an Apple Airtag tracker and seeing where they went – and the result was quite surprising.
The experience was carried out by Moe.ha on Tiktok. They slipped an Airtag into a pair of sneakers given, then placed them in a collection of the Red Cross in Munich, Germany.
During five days, the shoes left Germany and crossed Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, before finally arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 800 km from their starting location. Once there, they met on a shelf in a used store.
Moe.ha decided to follow the sneakers given in Bosnia and Herzegovina and managed to locate the store, where the shoes were found seated on a shelf, waiting to be purchased for around 10 euros. According to an employee of the store, the items were brought by their boss, who lives in Germany.
How did it happen?
You may be wondering how a pair of shoes given has been so far from their original location-after all, would that have no more sense to send them to a goodwill store in the region to be sold there?
Reality, however, is more complicated. According to the German Red Cross website (via translation), there are two different routes that clothes can take. An option is the “recycling model”, which results in all the content of a collection of donations sold to a recycling company.
The other model is the “clothing deposit model”, where clothing is sorted by the Red Cross and the appropriate items are distributed in deposits and thrift stores, with excessive parts sold to a recycler. This path seems to be the process that Moe’s sneakers. Ha have undergone. Whatever the road taken, however, the profits go towards the work of the Red Cross.
An experience like this shows the value of the attachment of a tracker as an Airtag to an important element, just in case you lose it. Even if the shoes have traveled 800 km across Europe, Moe.ha was still able to follow them using my apple application.
I hope that all the items you lose will not happen so far, but if you have a tracker of attached items, you may be able to track them anyway.