AdventureMom
Senior Community Member
Check out this site for the Colorado Children's Automobile Safety Associates. Some of you may have heard of this Car Seat Guy before...? Anyway, I wish there were a program like this near me.
He takes expired seats, gets help in stripping them down to just the plastic, then hauls the plastic shells to a recycling center:
He takes expired seats, gets help in stripping them down to just the plastic, then hauls the plastic shells to a recycling center:
In 2005, over 750 car seats were collected and recycled. Our pace for 2006 exceeded 1200 seats. The weight of the collected and recycled materials has not been calculated, but it is considerable. An average car seat is about 5 pounds of #5 plastic, cloth, foam, nylon harnesses, some polystyrene plastic and some metal. The bulk of the weight is the car seat shell made of the #5 plastic. This plastic, though not in high demand, is easily recyclable and often returns to us as plastic lumber or butter tubs. Most deliveries made to the local recycler are between a pickup truck load and a partly full 15 foot box truck. All recyclable components are delivered to the recycler. Non-recyclable parts, mostly nylon harness straps, polystyrene, foam and some cloth, are currently sent to the land fill. Some cloth covers are used for cleaning rags, given to quilters, used for cloth paper making classes or kept for seats in our loaner program.