4 Reasons Why Recycling Your Car Seat Is A No Brainer
From the first day, you leave the hospital with your newborn, through the first several years of their lives, safety car seats are a critical aspect of your everyday routine. You can’t imagine life without it. It goes everywhere you do. Then just like that, as your kids outgrow the infant, the toddler, or the booster seats, the safety seats which have been a constant reassuring presence in your child’s life go from being extremely important to extremely inconvenient. Now it’s just taking up space in a garage or attic, collecting dust, adding to the clutter. You’ll look at it a few times and think “maybe someone will need it?” or “I’ll find something to do with it.” The reality is, 9 times out of 10 those same car seats that were such a huge part of your life are going to end up in a landfill.
There are 10-12 million car seats sold every year, so the 90% of them that end up in landfills equates to roughly 100 million pounds of plastic, foam, and metal. Materials that, when properly sorted and prepared, can be recycled.
It’s not because it is difficult and time-consuming that it should not be done. After all, a car seat is just too valuable to just throw away.
That’s why we launched CarSeatRecycling.com, to make sure that the car seats that protected your children all those years are handled in the most responsible way possible. They did their job, and now it’s time to make sure that they don’t end up in a landfill or incinerator, contributing to plastic pollution and air quality degradation.
So, what makes CarSeatRecycling.com the best option for disposing of your car seats?
1. Super Simple and Easy to Use
In three easy steps, you can make sure that your car seat is recycled properly.
- Go to CarseatRecycling.com, to pay for the car seat to be recycled. You receive a prepaid shipping label to send the car seat to one of our recycling centers. We recommend that you re-use a box you have on hand, but if you prefer, we can send you a kit, which includes a shipping bag and a prepaid shipping label.
- Place the old or broken car seat into your box or our bag and apply the prepaid shipping label.
- Drop them to the UPS store of your choice and we take care of the rest.
That’s it. The process couldn’t be easier.
2. Available Every Day, From Coast to Coast
When it comes to car seat recycling now, you basically have a few options:
- You can spend hours on Facebook trying to find a car seat recycling program near you, and there is a 99% probability that there isn’t.
- Major retailers like Target and Walmart promote a take-back program, but it only runs for a few a year at best.
- Likewise, some manufacturers and very few municipalities provide a recycling program in limited areas and with limited availability, but you usually have to dismantle the car seats yourself.
Our mail-in solution is the only coast-to-coast car seat recycling program that is available 365 days a year.
3. Designed To Handle Any Volume From A Single Car Seat to Millions
While a mail-back program is better suited for consumers, it is not ideal to accommodate large volume at one time.
We created a second program, which is specifically designed to collect hundreds or thousands of car seats in a short period of time and remains very easy to use.
Whether you are a municipality, a retailer, a school, a hospital, or any other charitable association, you can rely on CarsSeatRecycling to safely collect, transport, and recycle a large number of car seats.
We further enhanced the standard operating procedures to allow for contactless product handling.
4. Trusted and Experienced
We work with national retailers and manufacturers to provide a scalable and affordable car seat recycling solution. Last year alone, we recycled over 500,000 car seats. That’s over 7.5 million pounds of waste diverted from the landfill and over 5 million pounds of polypropylene (PP) plastic recycled into raw materials.
The recycling program is time-consuming, as the safety seats need to be manually disassembled so the nylon, the foam, the metal, and the polypropylene are separated. The plastic material is then cleaned, melted using high-end equipment to reach the melting point of about 4,650 F. The material is then cut into pellets and is shipped to manufacturers to make products such as reusable shipping pallets, containers, brooms, garden rakes, or plastic trays for example.
We use a vast network of recycling outlets. From mega-facilities that process hundreds of truckloads, to small companies that provide work to recent parolees, helping people whose life took a wrong turn get back on their feet by providing them with the opportunity to earn wages safely dismantling hard to recycle items, and reinsert themselves into the workforce.
In the end, what you should do with your old, recalled or broken car seat is up to you. The safety seat that was responsible for your kid’s safety for all those years can be processed into new material. By handling the seats responsibly, you not only prevent waste from piling up in landfills, but you also do what’s right for the environment and your community.
