Newbury mum's car seat petition signed by more than 4,000 people
Mother demanding Government action on recycling
A NEWBURY mother-of-two has started a petition calling on the Government to make children’s car seats recyclable.
Kayleigh Powell, 32, is demanding a “clear and accessible recycling programme” for all parents in the UK so that their second-hand seats are not dumped in landfill.
Experts currently advise people not to buy a second-hand child seat as you cannot be certain of its history, saying it may have been involved in an accident and suffered invisible damage.
However, this produces a lot of unusable, expired seats which largely have one destination – landfill.
Car seats are hard to recycle because they are made of a mixture of materials – rigid plastic, metal and fabric – strongly bonded together to withstand high impacts.
In some cases, it will end up in an incinerator, which burns waste materials to create energy, such as electricity, while recovering any metals.
In others, recyclable elements such as metal and plastics might be stripped from the seat first.
Some say incineration is the most efficient method, but critics argue it is bad for climate change and could discourage recycling.
Mrs Powell said: “The problem with second-hand car seats is you can’t really give them away, they are really hard to sell and you usually can’t gift it away to charity.
“You’re kind of left with one option really, and that is to take it to the tip, which seems a real waste.”
Mrs Powell said she started the petition after her family were involved in a car accident that wasn’t their fault and found that nobody would take the car seat.
A statement from West Berkshire Council read: “Like the majority of UK local authorities, we currently don’t collect car seats separately for recycling in West Berkshire.
“This is because they are made of harder-to-recycle rigid/hard plastics for which a viable recycling market does not currently exist in the UK.
“We used to separately collect hard plastics at our household recycling centres, but discontinued this because we were having to transport them over long distances to the nearest off-taker at great cost and this was also not good for the environment.”
The council explained it doesn’t have any plans, at this stage, to introduce separate collections for car seats within the district.
It added: “We believe that this is a producer responsibility matter, ie it is for the manufacturers of car seats to either provide suitable takeback or recycling schemes for their products at the end-of-life stage, or to provide funding for others, eg local authorities to do this on their behalf.
“In line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle, the responsibility should be on producers to ensure that they are using more recyclable materials in their manufacturing process, designing products to last longer or for products that cannot be reused, to provide suitable recycling infrastructure.
“To that end, we are happy that the petitioner is asking for this to be addressed at a national level and has addressed her petition to the Government.”
The petition has so far been signed by more than 4,200 people.
