Been there - done that.
What does it really take in the mattress recycling world to avoid being up a creek without a paddle?
When one is in the business of recycling mattresses and box springs there are five main recyclables - 1.) Cotton, 2.) Foam, 3.) Felt, 4.) Wood, and 5.) Steel. Please allow us to consider each of these five recyclables and fees as being an oar (paddle) on the mattress recycling vessel.
The cotton paddle: Cotton out of the farmers' fields has a very lucrative market and that farmers' market is well protected by legislation. For cotton, the legislation which protects farmers has a tendency to hurt mattress recycling facilities efforts to reuse cotton out of mattresses. There are underlying reasons for this and the main one is the sometimes toxic compounds mattress manufacturers use to make mattresses to include fire retardant chemicals are in the cotton coming from mattresses. Who wants to wear toxic laden garments?
Fortunately, there are many other markets that purchase cotton. One of the larger buyers are in the paper manufacturing industry. There is usually a high volume of cotton in the fine linen papers used for special occasions and to impress others - remember your last resume and the paper you used? On the green side of things, reused cotton has found a use in the rope like sponges used to clean up oil spills. There are more uses for recycled cotton.
The foam paddle: Foam can be re-melted and formed into many shapes and sizes. There is barely any difference between the new foam and recycled foam markets. Thus there are markets to which mattress recyclers can sell foam.
The felt paddle: Felt can be reused in many products and has a very nice market in carpet padding. As carpet padding is normally in demand, there is a market to which mattress recyclers can sell felt.
The wood paddle: Wood is not usually found in mattresses, but is often used as framing material in box springs. The highest and best use for wood coming out of box springs is to resell it directly as dimensional lumber. The problem is separating the wood from the box springs without destroying the dimensional shape of the lumber via splitting, breaking or the wood being damaged earlier prior to recycling. When the latter happens, there is still a market for the wood in the wood pellets used for heating fuel or after chipping the wood making it into garden mulch.
The simplicity of the first four paddles: In the mattress recycling business, a laborer using simple hand tools can separate cotton, foam, felt, and wood from the steel springs and sort each of those items into recycling bins. There are other materials such as the ticking (mattress cover) and cardboard that if in adequate quantity may be sold to buyers or may well be discarded as trash. The point here is that mattress recycling offers jobs to individuals who are willing to work, but lack the high-tech/high skills required by many other employment opportunities. Unskilled workers need jobs to feed the family just as much - if not more - than skilled employees.
The steel paddle: This brings us to the steel inner springs or the steel box springs. Simple hand tools will not - absent super human tedious efforts - reduce these large bulky spring sets down into scrap metal dimensions for easy handling, reasonable shipping costs, and make them acceptable to steel scrap recyclers.
For mattress recyclers to deal with the steel springs, there are million dollar machines that will shred the entire mattress to include the steel into a finished product that when sent to the landfill will not take up so much space or be a problem for landfill machinery. There are other machines that will bale the inner springs up into cubical shapes that are then bound via strapping to keep the springs in-place. In Missouri, the Garden City Mattress Recycling facility invested in a chopping machine that would cut the springs into short lengths and it cost almost $300,000. This machine worked perfectly to process about six mattresses and then fatally failed. Not much amortization there. Confronted with the non-affordability of million dollar machines, scared of potential rapid expansion of baled springs should the strapping fail, and knowing that chopping machines do not work very well - the Spring Compactor Invention was developed to take the memory of the spring away so that the springs can not rapidly expand after compaction (Ever watch a trash truck open up its compactor door and see all the springs come flying out?) and takes the air out of the spring set so that steel - not air - is the main volume of material being transported to the steel mill.
The fee paddle: There is one more oar on the mattress recycling vessel and that is a service fee. Now this fee can well be a tipping fee at the local landfill or for curbside pickup, it can come in the form of government grants that are made available from taxpayers taxes. Or, like tire recycling, it can be a fee paid directly by the consumer at the time of purchasing a new mattress. This fee, regardless of its source, is needed to compensate the mattress recycler for the very high costs of handling and transporting these bulky mattresses.
We have now identified and partially described six mattress recycling vessel paddles (oars) - cotton, foam, felt, wood, steel, and fees. When all of these mattress recycling oars are working together and the oars are in sync, this baby grass roots industry we call mattress recycling has a really good chance of being profitable for the owner, serving the environment via reuse/recycling of valuable products, and interwoven into all of this is the creation of new jobs in your community.
Mattress recycling is a rather new industry. Opportunity for you to be at the helm of your community's mattress recycling vessel is quite real and if you run out the numbers and can show both a profit and creation of new jobs for your city – the many economic stimulus packages have real meaning for you in the form of grants. Or, you can chose to be like the main stream citizenry and their interest in mattresses - you can just sleep on it.....
