What You Need to Know About Walmart’s Car Seat Trade-in Event
Walmart will give you a $30 gift card this month for recycling the car seat that your child has outgrown, but there are a few things you need to know before you drop it off.
With 4000 stores across the US, the number of car seats that Walmart collects during National Baby Safety Month could turn out to provide a whole lot of stress relief for landfills.
Instead of letting them pile up like most of us do in our garage, Walmart is planning to recycle thousands of car seats through TerraCycle. They said that's expected to keep the plastic equivalent of about 35 million water bottles out of landfills.
The Walmart Car Seat Recycling Event will happen from September 16th through 30th, and you'll be able to trade in used car seats at the service desk in any participating Walmart store and get a $30 Walmart gift card that can be used in-store or online toward more baby items. If it's time to upgrade your car seat and get the next size up, this will be a no-brainer. And apparently, they're not going to screen a car seat for juice stains and Goldfish crumbs before they accept it, so just haul it in there as-is. There's a limit of two gift cards per household.
Hearing this news I was halfway into the garage to start loading up booster seats when I learned that sadly, those aren't eligible. It's just the car seats. But booster seats do make nice cat-scratching pads, so we'll keep using them for that. At least they're not single-use.
When kids outgrow the big stuff we never really know what to do with it, so it usually ends up in the trash. This takes care of the guilt tied to tossing it, and there's a gift card in it too. Nice. Now, can we do something similar with the piles of shoes that become too small after six months? Hopefully, that's next.