On car seat recycling

23 Jun 2008

Got questions about the environment? Ask Umbra.

Dear Umbra,

What do you recommend for child car seat disposal or, better yet, recycling? Near as I can tell, options include giving them away to someone who needs them (a pretty discouraged practice) or sending them to Oregon or Colorado where a couple of renegade recycling programs are working to resolve this huge issue. I am about to become a parent, and we just bought a new car seat (bad, I know). I'd love to know if you have any other ideas, oh brilliant eco-Umbra.

Sarah
Seattle, Wash.

Dearest Sarah,

It's good that you bought a new car seat. The purpose of a car seat is to keep your child alive and well in the event of a crash. This is a valid reason to buy a seat with a known history and reliability, and you should not feel bad about buying a new one, just as you should not regret buying new safety helmets, new climbing gear, or other lifesaving equipment that can be invisibly damaged. Sadly, we also can't feel too bad about throwing out unusable car seats, because the programs you tracked down are the only ones I could find.

Before you dispose of your car seat, reflect carefully.

Photo: Mark & Marie Finnern

The generally accepted guideline is not to buy or sell a used car seat over six years old -- which sounds to me as if it needs to be amended to: Don't use a car seat over six years old. Some seats have an expiration date marked somewhere on the frame, or listed on the manufacturer's website. The plastic of the seat can (invisibly) degrade in the sun and heat of a car, and in the plain old passage of time. Additionally, used car seats should be eschewed unless you get their complete history from a person you trust. You don't want a car seat if it has been involved in a car accident, unless that accident meets the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's definition of "minor." The accident was not minor if, among other factors, the air bag deployed, the vehicle had to be towed, or anyone was injured. You can find the complete NHTSA guidelines for car seat reuse here. Also, before accepting or gifting a used car seat, check the NHTSA site to see if the seat was recalled for defects.

Those who are done with their car seats, then, should pass them on to other parents if the seat is less than six years old, has not been recalled, and passes the NHTSA guidelines. (If you're the buyer, see these tips for assessing a used car seat.) It's best to do this gifting in person, so that the recipient can be assured of your honesty and good intentions.

What if you have a car seat that cannot be passed along? As Sarah mentioned, car seats are recycled by community programs in Colorado and Oregon. In Colorado, a fellow started collecting and breaking down the components in his garage, and now processes more than 1,000 seats a year. In the Portland, Ore., area, a hospital collects the seats at a car seat safety event. The rest of us appear out of luck, though it can't hurt to contact hospitals or police departments in your area to see if they have other thoughts.

Ask Umbra continues below

ADVERTISING POLICY

If you can't find a way to reuse the seat or a program set up to recycle seats, I think there are still a few options. Call your municipal trash team, or local recycling collection company, and ask if they will recycle the seat. Offer to disassemble it yourself. The big idea is of course to organize your own car seat recycling project. You know, once you have your baby you'll just have oodles of free time, plus tons of energy and interest in making phone calls to arrange a major garbage collection event. Ha. I do think it must be feasible, though maybe not for a new parent, to call these other car seat recycling projects, find out how they did it, call your local plastics recycler and learn if they would accept disassembled car seats if a certain poundage of material was met, find a community organization that would sponsor the event if you came up with the volunteers, get the volunteers from an online/in-person parents' group, and proceed forward to make Seattle recycling history. This all sounds daunting, I'm sure, but remember, you won't need to recycle your own new car seat for another six years. By then you'll have the energy to organize a recycling event.

More email alerts | Privacy

If you cannot find a way to recycle a defunct car seat, don't feel bad about throwing it out. Make sure that no one else will find and use your unsafe seat, though. Disassemble it in such a way as to make it unusable -- cut the straps, separate the cover and straps from the plastic base, write "broken" on the frame in big permanent marker -- and put it out for trash collection. In closing, I want to say the obvious thing about parents and driving: The best feeling we can hope for when passing on or throwing away our old car seat is that we didn't use it very often.

Five-pointly,
Umbra

Yours is to wonder why, hers is to answer (or try). Please send Umbra any nagging question pertaining to the environment -- but first check out her FAQs!

The claims made in this column may not reflect the views of this magazine. Neither the magazine nor the author guarantees that any advice contained in this column is wise or safe. Please use this column at your own risk.

Umbra Fisk is Grist Research Associate II, Hardcover and Periodicals Unit, floors 2B-4B.

Comments: (7 comments)

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have a Gristmill account, log in below. If you don't have a Gristmill account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.

RE: Recycling

This is yet another instance in which the manufacturers are the most perfectly-placed to step up and take responsibility for their own production decisions.

They will know how old and in what condition each seat is. They also should be best able to recycle the seats that are ineligible for re-use. Perhaps a seat is young enough to be reused, but for how long? Will it expire halfway through the career of the second owner?

It's another opportunity to push for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing practices. All manufacturers receive an invisible subsidy in that it's left to purchasers and localities to pay for recycling or disposal of their cast-off products. If they make it, they need to OWN the ancillary burdens of it through the product's entire life-cycle.

Charge original buyers a deposit (to be returned) for bringing the spent seats back to any baby store for return to the manufacturer for recycling as part of the purchase price.

Maybe the deposit is picked up by the locality for low-income folks, since they won't need to dig a pit to put it in.

One other thought: Why don't automobile manufacturers have their own designs for child restraints purpose-made to fit their cars? One imagines they'd be good for the life of the car, as all the other seating and safety-related systems are. Not least, they'd be easier to install! Volvo made a feeble effort at this with their child booster seats on some models. Do they still even do that much?

Too much design energy (and potential for failure) is due to these seat manufacturers having to make the harness attachment points vague enough to fit any car. This leads to greater likelihood of improper (unsafe) installations by new parents who've got a LOT on their minds already. I say, get the auto companies to tackle designing this value-added device into each car (as an option, at least, available to be bought and installed at the dealer).

Recycle vegetable oil in your recycled Mercedes diesel!

by Zino at 9:55 AM on 23 Jun 2008

Producer responsibility & take-back?

For car seats? Interesting concept! I've never before heard it it suggested for child car seats. Not sure it would work. Who makes most child seats today, and where do they manufacture them (I'm guessing most not in the US). What would be the pressure points to apply to get them to undertake take-back (most industries, especially in the US, fight the idea)? What level would you set the deposit (or an advance recovery fee) at that would reduce consumer, producer, retailer resistance to the scheme?

Something else I wonder about, since my kids are big now and it's been about 15 years since I last looked at a child car seat: what plastic resin is being used to manufacture them? [Are they even marked?] Unless it is PET or HDPE, you might have a hard time finding a recycler willing to pay to recycle them. Curb services may accept the plastic casings for pick up, but not actually recycle them (in which case, what is the point, to my mind).

by ioman01 at 10:32 AM on 23 Jun 2008

Recycling idea?

How easy it would be to turn a kiddie car seat into a backyard swing. (Or even a swing on the front porch, etc., if you don't have a yard.) Though your child will eventually outgrow it, the refurbished "swing seat" would make an excellent garage sale item.

by TMS at 10:48 AM on 23 Jun 2008

Good topic!

Child's car seats are one of the items I see most frequently abandoned along streets in the SF Bay Area. They always give me a moment of panic: Did someone leave their baby behind? No, just one more harried parent whose kid outgrew the seat and couldn't figure out what else to do with it. I'm sure each one would fail Umbra's guidelines for re-use. I hope parents push the manufacturers for a take-back plan.

Eat what you grow, grow what you eat

by PermieWriter at 3:46 PM on 23 Jun 2008

Built-in Child seats

Volkswagen sells a minivan in Europe that has built-in child seats as an option. Its called Volkswagen Sharan. A friend of mine owns one and says its great and very convenient to fold away when not needed. Of course this seat doesn't work for infants, but it seems like it should be possible to figure out a good solution for that too.

by jja at 5:11 AM on 24 Jun 2008

This is why...

the true environmentalist does not have kids, or at least limits their procreation to one child. There is no way around the fact that having kids puts a strain on the environment. Umbra's column before this one was on how reusable cloth diapers are not significantly better than their disposable counterpart. In that article, she mentioned some of the other ways where increasing the size of one's family will inevitably put added strain on the ecosystem, as having kids means using more resources. Sure, I can take the moral high ground on this as I am not able to have children due to reproductive health issues that lead to my hysterectomy (which I had at a young age). I guess I also have the privelege of taking the highground on not having use for female hygene products that fill our landfills. Yes, it is a convenient truth for me, until you realize the constant pain I have endured due to illness caused from PCBs in the groundwater of the place where I grew up. But the thing is, if I would have been able to give birth, I would have chose not to.
The population crisis appears to be the environmental elephant in the room. No one wants to discuss it because it is truly the most inconvenient truth of all. But what makes it worse is that society pressures people to have children. If you choose to remain childless (and shudder to think that you choose to remain single and childless), you are ostracized by society, or at least in the U.S. It is time we take a different approach. There was a time for "Maybe One" (referring to the book written on the subject by Bill McKibben), but now is the time for "maybe none." People have to reexamine their reasons for having children. Please do not have children for any of the following:

To keep your marriage together. Trust me, this doesn't work. I have a friend who thought she could avoid the truth about her marriage if she had a baby. BIG MISTAKE!
Societal pressures. Whether it is because a doctor advises you that this will help your reproductive health (I got a lot of that, but these arguments have been scientifically refuted by the Endometriosis Association) or if it is your only way to get health care coverage or other benefits, just don't do it. These are the wrong reasons for having kids. Do not bear children for cheap commodities. Do not bear children because your other middle class friends are having kids. Get past the pressure and start speaking up if you truly do not want children. It is your responsibility to do so!
Do not have children because you want to have a clone of you that might be able to acheive what you have not. I see too many parents who fall into this category. They live vicariously through their kids, often making their children miserable. This is vanity, and it is a deadly sin. It is certainly deadly where the planet is concerned.
Do not fall for any religious garbage about procreation. The texts this argument is based on were written when the earth's population was around 150 million, not over 6 billion! Be fruitful and multiply no longer applies. It is time to stock up on your favorite method of birth control and turn the other cheek when your religious leader tries to make you feel bad about not wanting to contribute to the population crisis.

And now to sit back and wait for the complaints.

by CountBlah at 6:57 PM on 24 Jun 2008

Car seats that last longer

Another method for reducing the impact of car seat purchases is to get one that lasts a long time. Several toddler seats can last from 5-35 lbs rear facing and up to 65 lb front facing - the Britax Decathalon is one example. Infant seats with a separate base are incredibly helpful for their portability, but by 9 mos an infant is often too heavy to carry in an infant seat anyway. At this point, if not before, it is smart to make a long term investment in a convertable toddler seat rather than getting one that only goes up to 40 lbs. I bought a used infant seat - since it was only used for 9 mos or so, another child would be able to use it as well.

There are also a number of toddler seats that convert to boosters. In Massachusetts children are required to be in a booster seat until 8 years old - that would be a lot of car seats if you have to buy one for each 10-lb weight gain!

And CountBlah - I thank you for taking a slightly less reactionary approach than some - I agree that those are terrible reasons to bring a new life into the world. I also think Grist (and other enviro-mags) have realized that parents have strong environmental interests and it doesn't make sense to exclude them from the conversation. Yes it would be environmentally better not to have children - there's no way around that. But if you choose to have children (and your points adress this choice), there are more environmentally friendly ways to do things.

by holmbere at 9:45 AM on 27 Jun 2008

The comments of Grist users reflect the opinions of those individuals only, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of Grist, its staff, its board members, their psychotherapists, or their aestheticians. Got it?

Belt Experience