Recycle Your Old Car Seat At Target And Get A Discount On A New One

Because we needed another reason to go there

Oh, Target. Just when we thought we couldn’t love you more, now you’re actually accepting our old car seats and upcycling them for us. You’re doing something good for the environment and taking these enormous plastic monsters off our hands. You are so, so dreamy.

From Monday, April 17th through Sunday, April 30th, you can bring your used car seat to Target stores nationwide and, in exchange, you’ll get a 20% coupon to use on any of their car seats through May 31st. In honor of Earth Day on April 22nd, Target has teamed up with Terracycle, a company that, according to its website, is “a global leader in hard-to-recycle waste” to upcycle the car seats into new products, like…more car seats. (We’re kidding. We’re kidding. They actually turn them into things like bags, gardening supplies, office supplies, and more, all of which you can buy on their site.)

Terracycle, you will be best man at our wedding with Target.

Disposing of used car seats is a headache for everyone — you don’t have to be an eco-warrior to feel awful about throwing a big ol’ hunk of plastic in the trash. There are recycling programs for car seats, but they’re few and far between. Toys R’ Us holds a Great Trade-In event twice a year for 4-5 weeks at a time, with no cap on the amount of exchanges. They’ve received over a million trade-ins so far. That’s a whole mess of car seats.

To give you another idea of how popular these kinds of programs are, Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon, which takes used car seats year-round, “recycled just over 6 tons of car seats” in 2014. In this event, Target hopes to collect “more than 700,000 pounds of car seat material” that would otherwise go to landfills.

Apparently, Target tested this program out at 90 stores in September, and it went so well that they decided to expand it for this event. That’s great news because according to an article on Fox 31 Denver, “Bins will be located in the baby section or near the front of the store, and guests can then locate a team member to receive the coupon.” Does that make anyone else break out into a light sweat? Because right now I picture overflowing bins with car seats piled everywhere and team members being hunted down like animals. But this isn’t Target’s first rodeo, so I’m sure they’ve got this all figured out.

We love this idea. We love it love it love it love it.

So call your Target and get your old car seat ready for next week. We’ll be writing “Mrs. Scary Mommy Target” in our notebooks all weekend.