Between September 10 and 23, Baltimore area residents can recycle used car seats! In celebration of National Baby Safety Month, 1,700 Target stores nationwide and across Maryland are hosting car seat collection programs to help residents reduce household clutter without sending waste to landfills. All car seats collected in this program will be recycled through TerraCycle so that each component will see a second life.

Admit it: You have at least one outgrown car seat moldering away in a closet or the garage. Everyone does, because you paid good money for it, used it daily, and then when you didn’t need it anymore, soon realized that no one wants a used car seat. Charities generally won’t take them, they don’t sell at yard sales, friends don’t want them, and if you had thoughts of recycling them so that the plastic and metal would get reused, you soon realized that was unlikely, if not impossible. (For more on that, see BabyCenter’s story Can you recycle car seats? Why that’s a tough question to answer) So what are you supposed to do with your old car seat? Just throw it in the trash? Well, yeah — unless you live in one of the rare communities that offer a car seat recycling program, that’s what experts generally advise: cut the straps so the seat can’t be used again, recycle any parts you can, and dump the rest in the trash. Not many people are comfortable doing that, and so the car seats in garages continue to wait for their final destination. But if you live near a Target, you have another option: Target is teaming up with nationwide recycling company TerraCycle to launch a massive — and unprecedented — car seat recycling program. Bring in your old car seat(s) (you can bring 4 per day!) from April 17-30, and you’ll get a coupon for 20 percent off any car seat purchase, in-store or online. You can use the coupon until May 31, 2017. Sharp readers may be wondering why I called the Target Take Back “unprecedented,” when Babies”R”Us and Toys”R”Us have been hosting their Great Trade-In events for years. Though both programs do exchange used baby gear for discounts on new stuff (and you may have believed/hoped that what you brought there was recycled), the store merely safely disposes of used gear instead of recycling it. And no shade on these stores, either, the principal problem with recycling baby gear is that it simply isn’t made with recycling in mind. It’s made to be safe, useful, and cute — not to be used again. Target expects to get more then 700,000 pounds of donated seats, based on what the company received in a test for the program that was held in 90 stores in September. Look for bins in Target’s Baby section, or near the front of the store. Don’t see one? Ask, and it shall be found for you. Veronica Rajadnya, a representative for TerraCycle, says that the donated seats will be collected at Target’s distribution center and shipped to TerraCycle’s third-party recycling partners in various areas of the country. There the seats will be pried apart, their components separated, the plastic melted and “pelletized,” and from there sold to manufacturers to make into new products, like “plastic wood” pallets, park benches, playground equipment, and furniture: “In [TerraCycle’s] courtyard we have a chair made entirely out of old Capri Sun packets, it’s the most comfortable chair ever.”

Between April 17 and 30, Boston area residents can recycle used car seats! In celebration of Earth Month, 1,700 Target stores nationwide and across Massachusetts are hosting a car seat collection program to help residents reduce household clutter without sending waste to landfills. All car seats collected through this program will be recycled through TerraCycle so that each component will see a second life. Residents should bring their car seats to their participating Target store and look for Target’s car seat collection box in the front of the store or in the baby/kids floor pad section. When a customer turns in a used car seat, he or she will receive a coupon for 20% off the purchase of a new one. After the recycling program ends, TerraCycle will separate the different components of the car seats (cloth elements, plastics, metals, etc.) and process them for use in other products.

  Dive Brief:  

• Target will be joining The Recycling Partnership as its first retail company member. The nonprofit says that with this addition it now has members from all sides of the consumer recycling system: manufacturers, brands, retailers and the recycling industry.
• Funding from Target will help expand local curbside recycling options through grants, tools and specialized marketing. 
• Since the beginning of 2015, the nonprofit has spurred $21 million of new recycling infrastructure for more than two million households.

  Dive Insight:   The Recycling Partnership now has more than 20 major corporate members and has been rolling out new initiatives at a rapid pace this year. The nonprofit recently announced a new initiative with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) to perform a comprehensive analysis of the recovery landscape, teamed up with the Environmental Protection Agency on a curbside study and released free online open source tools for communities. In addition, they also plan to place more than 300,000 recycling carts in the coming months.   "Target joining signals a new era for our organization, as we are officially supported by the whole system," said Keefe Harrison, executive director of The Recycling Partnership, in a press release. "More than that, Target brings specific expertise in meeting the needs of the many guests to their stores, and through our work together that insight will translate into better recycling programs for more consumers across the country."   This announcement is part of an ongoing sustainability push by Target which includes redesigning packaging of store-brand items, reducing emissions and reducing waste. The retailer set a goal of reducing waste 15% by 2015 though did not achieve it. In addition to this new membership, Target is also part of the SPC and recently worked with TerraCycle on a take back program for car seats.