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Don’t throw away your old baby supplies. Here’s how to give them a new life.

Here’s how to give baby clothes, toys and strollers new life once they are no longer needed.

5 min
Some items, like baby bottles, can be recycled in your curbside recycling bin. (Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images)
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With the excitement of a baby’s arrival comes a long list of shopping items: clothes, bottles, furniture.

Then parents watch as their child quickly outgrows these items.

“There’s an awful lot of guilt around the amount of baby stuff that parents get” as gifts, said Kate O’Neill, a professor and associate dean at the Rausser College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley. “They say, ‘We have all this free stuff, and now we don’t know what to do with it.’”

The global baby product industry was worth over $320 billion in 2023, and it is expected only to grow, according to Grand View Research. So it comes as no surprise that common items like baby clothing and toys end up in the landfill.

The good news is you can give most of your baby products a new life, either by donating them or giving them to special recycling programs. The effort will keep items out of the landfill and lessen the production of new products, and it doesn’t need to be time-consuming.

Here’s what to do with the baby products you no longer need.

What to donate

The first thing to check is whether someone could reuse your pre-loved item.

If your items are still in good condition, there’s a good chance you can sell or donate larger ones like strollers, cribs and car seats. For these items, you need to ensure they haven’t expired; car seats typically expire in six to 10 years if they haven’t been in a crash, and experts advise against using a crib more than 10 years past its manufacture date. Constantly evolving safety standards or product recalls may make your old item unsafe to reuse, even if it was kept in good condition. Though not all donation centers will accept used car seats and other baby items, some service organizations and women’s shelters may take them.

There is a large reuse market for baby clothing, given how quickly babies grow. You can donate baby clothes anywhere you would typically donate adult clothing. Use these tips to fight unsightly stains.

Many toys can be donated or swapped among friends, said Katherine Pazakis, chief commercial officer at the recycling business TerraCycle.

“You’d be pleasantly surprised at the quality of secondhand toys that you get in programs or that you can trade for in your community,” Pazakis said. She suggested one way to give your kids new toys is “passing along things like puzzles or rotating them around groups.”

New and unused diapers can be donated to diaper banks, and some will also take unopened and unexpired formulas. Cloth and compostable diapers are also on the market, which can reduce waste, said Alexa Kielty, the residential zero waste senior coordinator at the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

Kielty said she has had success posting used items on the neighborhood app Nextdoor, where neighbors can pick up items right from your curb.

It’s important to opt for secondhand items and make it known to your friends and family that you may not need to buy many new products, she added.

“In most, but not all cases, the primary environmental benefit of reuse or recycling is not in avoiding the landfill but in displacing the production of new products,” said Reid Lifset, a research scholar at the Yale School of the Environment.

What can be recycled

If your item must be discarded, check to see whether it can be recycled. Plastic items like baby bottles and sippy cups that are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) or polypropylene can go in your curbside recycling bin.

Curbside recycling is best for objects made of one material and for rigid plastic items that are within the size range of aluminum cans and plastic laundry detergent bottles, according to Charlotte Dreizen, sustainability director at the Plastics Industry Association. Toys of that size and other plastic items like a potty training seat can go in your curbside bin.

“What a specific community can accept can definitely vary,” Dreizen said, “but generally speaking, recycling facilities, no matter where you are in the country, sort paper first and plastics and metal and glass last.”

Bottles for baby lotion or diaper creams can also go in your curbside bin, she said.

Some items may be too big for curbside recycling, like a children’s outdoor playset, or too small, like a pacifier or bottle nipple. Items like car seats may have recyclable components but won’t be able to go into curbside recycling because they are made of mixed materials.

There are many specialized recycling services that will take certain items off your hands. Car seats, for example, can go to Target’s trade-in program. There are take-back programs, including at Recycle Your Car Seat. Mattress recycling programs operate in a few states and can take the baby mattresses used in cribs or on changing tables. Some breast pump parts can be returned to the brand for recycling or reuse.

TerraCycle partners with brands to recycle specific items like baby food pouches, baby clothing, breast pump parts, and toys from certain brands for free. The program also offers a Zero Waste box you can purchase to recycle challenging items like bottle caps and strollers.

“The thing that parents are short on is time, and I recognize that it takes time to look for a local donation solution or to find a product versus just buying it,” Pazakis said. “But this is something that I think is important to teach our kids and to teach the next generation about how to be thoughtful with what we see in the country.”