- Someone put an air roof in a pair of sneakers and donated them to a charity
- The shoes ended up traveling 800 km across Europe
- This experiment shows what can happen to your donated clothing
When you donate clothes to a charity, do you actually know where they end up? In most cases, you don’t, but a Tiktok user decided to find out by mounting a pair of sneakers with an Apple Airtag tracker and seeing where they went -and the result was pretty surprising.
The experiment was performed by Moe.ha on Tiktok. They slid an airtag into a pair of donated sneakers and then placed them in a hill in the Red Cross in Munich, Germany.
Over the course of five days, the footwear left Germany and crossed through Austria, Slovenia and Croatia before eventually arriving in Bosnia -Herzegovina, 800 km from their starting location. When they were there, they wound up on a shelf in a used store.
Moe.ha decided to follow the donated sneakers to Bosnia -Herzegovina and managed to locate the store where the shoes were found sitting on a shelf and waiting to be bought for approx. 10 euros. According to an employee of the store, the items were brought in by their boss who lives in Germany.
How did this happen?
You may wonder how a pair of donated shoes ended up so far from their original location – after all, it wouldn’t make more sense to send them to a goodwill store in the local area to be sold there?
However, reality is more complicated. According to the German Red Cross website (via translation), there are two different routes donated clothing can take. One option is the “Recycler model”, which results in the entire content of a donation collection being sold to a recycling company.
The second model is the “clothing depot model”, where clothes are sorted by Red Cross, and appropriate items are distributed to depots and frugal stores where excess pieces are sold for a recycling. This route seems to be the process that Moe.ha’s Sneakers underwent. No matter what route is taken, the revenue goes towards the Red Cross work.
An experiment like this shows the value by attaching a tracker as an air roof to an important topic, just in case you lose it. Although the shoes traveled 800 km across Europe, Moe.ha was still able to follow them using Apple Find my app.
Hopefully all things you lose is not quite so far, but if you have an item tracker attached to them, you may be able to chase them no matter.
