Tracking the trash: Are your plastic bags really being recycled?

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- More and more cities, including Philadelphia, are banning plastic bags because of environmental dangers.

Some big box retailers offer drop-off bins for recycling, including Target and Walmart.

Working with ABC News and nine ABC stations we assembled bundles of recyclable plastic bags, each containing a tracking device to see if those bags are being recycled at all.

The Action News investigative team assembled four bags with four AirTags glued securely inside to ping and track the locations.

Our producer then dropped off our bags at Target recycling bins across the Delaware Valley, including the Target on Monument Road in Philadelphia and another in Springfield, Delaware County. We also dropped trackers in Plymouth Meeting and another in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Our ABC teams also fanned out across ten states dropping 46 bags in recycling bins at Walmart and other Target locations.

We then waited for them to ping.

Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics, said the United States ranks number one when it comes to plastic waste.

"There are real questions whether all of that film plastic is actually sent to a recycling facility or whether it just winds up at incinerators and landfills," said Enck.

Within the month, all of the trackers were on the move. The tracker in the plastic bag dropped in Philadelphia pinged at the Waste Management Transfer Station in the city's Grays Ferry neighborhood. It was then presumably mixed with other trash.

Waste Management told the investigative team the facility does not sort or recycle plastic bags.

Our three other trackers last pinged at Covanta facilities in our area. Covanta is a waste-to-energy plant. Simply put, the plant burns household garbage.

"We do not recycle plastics here at Covanta Camden," said Jack Bernardino with Covanta. "It is unfortunate that materials designated for recycling came here."

It turns out our discovery wasn't an anomaly. Of the 46 total trackers the ABC News teams dropped at bins, 23 of them last pinged at landfills or trash incinerators.

Seven trackers last stopped pinging at transfer stations that don't recycle or sort plastic bags, or ship to other facilities that do.

Three others we can't definitively say where they ended up.

And the other six last pinged at the store where they were left and haven't been heard from in months.

And three trackers our teams assembled were shipped to the other side of the world to Southeast Asia.

In total, only four trackers dropped by our teams ended up at US facilities that recycle plastic bags.

"For one thing, we shouldn't be making these things anymore," said Nancy Clark, who was shopping at Target. "Go back to paper bags please!"

Both Target and Walmart declined a request for an interview and a tour of their plastic bag recycling process.

Both say they are trying to make it easier for customers to recycle.

In a statement, Target said, "Our intention is to make it easy for our guests to recycle clean and empty plastic bags and packaging in our stores. We're proud of the recycling impact we're making - last year, we recycled nearly 24 million pounds of plastic bags and plastic film materials from our in-store recycling bins and across our store and distribution center operations. We take seriously the role we play in reducing waste and we're committed to looking at our processes to improve our recycling efforts."

Walmart told ABC News, "Walmart offers in-store recycling bins for plastic bags as an option for customers who may not have access to curbside recycling. We are also pursuing initiatives to reduce the use of single-use plastic including plastic bags, and working with policy makers, waste management companies, non-profits and other retailers to reduce demand for single-use plastic bags. To date, Walmart has helped remove over 2 billion single use bags from circulation and we are working across our omnichannel network to continue shifting to more sustainable choices."

You can stream the full ABC News investigation: "Trashed: The Secret Life of Plastic Recycling" on Tuesday, May 23 at 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC News Live and later on Hulu.