This AirTag experiment just revealed the surprising truth about what happens to your clothes donations

Someone put an AirTag in a pair of sneakers and donated them to a charity
The shoes ended up traveling 800km across Europe
This experiment shows just what can happen to your donated clothes

When you donate clothes to a charity, do you actually know where they end up? In most cases you don’t, but one TikTok user decided to find out by fitting a pair of sneakers with an Apple AirTag tracker and seeing where they went – and the result was pretty surprising.

The experiment was carried out by Moe.Ha on TikTok. They slipped an AirTag into a pair of donated sneakers, then placed them into a Red Cross collection bin in Munich, Germany.

Across the span of five days, the footwear left Germany and crossed through Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, before eventually arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 800km from their starting location. Once there, they wound up on a shelf in a second-hand store.

Moe.Ha decided to follow the donated sneakers to Bosnia and Herzegovina and managed to locate the store, where the shoes were found sitting on a shelf, waiting to be bought for about 10 euros. According to an employee in the store, the items were brought in by their boss, who lives in Germany.

How did this happen?

Apple AirTags

(Image credit: Apple)

You might wonder how a pair of donated shoes ended up so far from their original location – after all, wouldn’t it make more sense to send them to a goodwill store in the local area to be sold there?

The reality, however, is more complicated. According to the German Red Cross’s website (via translation), there are two different routes donated clothes can take. One option is the “recycler model,” which results in the entire contents of a donation collection being sold to a recycling company.

The other model is the “clothing depot model,” where clothes are sorted by the Red Cross and suitable items are distributed to depots and thrift stores, with excess pieces being sold to a recycler. This route appears to be the process that Moe.Ha’s sneakers underwent. Whichever route is taken, though, the proceeds go towards the Red Cross’s work.

An experiment like this shows the value in attaching a tracker like an AirTag to an important item, just in case you lose it. Even though the shoes traveled 800km across Europe, Moe.Ha was still able to follow them using Apple’s Find My app.

Hopefully any items you lose won’t go quite so far, but if you’ve got an item tracker attached to them, you might be able to hunt them down regardless.

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