DR3 Mattress Recycling
Old mattresses get new life!
The Future of Mattress Disposal
In a world of shrinking resources, one of the bugaboos of the mattress industry is what happens to mattresses that have died but have not made it to that great mattress factory in the sky. (Actually, that's most of them.) Think, then, of each retired mattress as a 23 cubic-foot assemblage of polyurethane foam, steel, cotton and wood. Keeping them out of landfills is a matter of efficiently recycling them so their core materials can be reincarnated into any number of new products.
As solutions to the landfill problem are beginning to take form, the mattress industry isn't being left behind. Some key players who are collaborating to recycle mattress components include a new recycling factory in Belgium, an internationally known research laboratory, a U.S. mattress manufacturer, a charitable organization in Oregon, and a California county's solid waste management program. And, of course, the International Sleep Products Association (ISPA).
Acting Locally
If you've heard the exhortation, "Think globally, act locally," you'll understand why the story might start with the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, in Eugene, Oregon. To some people, it might be a story about recycling mattresses. But to Terry McDonald, executive director of the organization, it's about jobs.
The SVdP Society also is one of 500 community development centers, which were designed to serve low-income communities across the United States. One of their primary missions is to create job opportunities and income-generating businesses within the community.
That was the genesis of the DR3 program. DR3 stands for "divert, reduce, reuse, recycle," which sums up what the SVdP mattress recycling program is about. In December 2001, the centerpiece of the society's DR3 program came into being: a mattress recycling facility in Alameda County, California, which processed 300 mattresses and box springs in its first week. Its grand opening was a resounding success.
Thus far, the program has created eight jobs in a leased, 10,000-square-foot building in Oakland. The recycling system separates steel, wood, and cotton elements, but the driver is the goal to recycle some 500,000 pounds of polyurethane foam per year.
The basic idea is to divert or reclaim mattresses and box springs from landfills and primarily transfer sites. Each city or county has such a site, which essentially is a staging area (typically, a large pit) at which garbage trucks dump trash. From there, the waste moves into packer trucks and is sent on to the landfill. (The transfer site also has a recycling area, where wood, tires and even computers can be set aside, to be rerouted for recycling.)
That's according to Lisa Schiller, who is a residential and special projects associate with the San Francisco recycling program, which is part of the solid waste management division. Last July, her program gave a $135,000 grant to the SVdP Society of Lane County to start this pilot project. That followed another grant of $20,000 from ISPA's Better Sleep Council, which assisted at the predevelopment stage.
Terry McDonald of SVdP also got a generous amount of advice from Verlo Mattress Factory Stores, headquartered in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Dave Young, the company's president, says each mattress discarded in a landfill takes up an average of 23 cubic feet. Several years ago, Verlo devised the National Outcycle Environmental Program. When Verlo delivers a customer's new mattress, it not only takes the old one away but also tears it down into the basic components.
Schiller explains that California has a mandate to recycle 50 percent of its waste stream this year. "To do that, we have to find new methods of recycling that aren't being utilized." In 1999, San Francisco generated 1.3 million tons of waste and recycled 42 percent of it. Her agency hopes to see SVdP recycle nearly 1,200 tons of bulk waste--not just mattresses but also, over time, other heavy but reusable items such as major appliances. In the next phase of the grant, she says, her agency expects to help the facility purchase a forklift and reusable trailers to store appliances waiting to be recycled there.
The Oakland Project
Mattress FactorySmack in the middle of an industrial area, at 1960 Williams Avenue, in San Leandro, is where you'll find the St. Vincent de Paul mattress recycling facility.
McDonald says the goal was to create an automated process. Chance Fitzpatrick explains that the mattress or box springs is pushed onto a conveyor belt, and the dismantling process begins as special saws slice away the soft materials on the top and bottom--in other words, separating the polyurethane foam and cotton fiber from the steel framework.
The remaining materials are put through the shredder. The metal is magnetically removed from the shredded mass, and the remaining fiber material is bailed. Fitzpatrick says that one worker can process 15 to 20 mattresses per hour using this procedure.
The average queen size mattress weighs about 63 pounds. Typically, polyurethane foam accounts for six of those 63 pounds. At the low end of Fitzpatrick's estimate (250 mattresses per day), the Oakland facility will recycle approximately 1,500 pounds of polyurethane foam per day, which translates to a half million pounds per year.
"This is an innovative approach to a very challenging material," says Steve Lautze. As recycling market development zone coordinator with the city of Oakland, he is, at the very least, an interested bystander. "Mattresses are designed not to come apart," he adds. "If you can recycle most of it, that's a major accomplishment."
Finished MattressesThe SVdP facility accepts mattresses from several sources beyond Oakland and San Francisco: the city of Berkeley; other Alameda County municipalities; the Davis Street Transfer Station; small businesses, such as apartment management companies disposing of old mattresses; mattress manufacturers; and commercial bedding sources, such as hotels and hospitals.
This is not the first recycling project for St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County. It already has an appliance rebuilding facility (handling 500 appliances a week); and a wood shop that makes pine furniture with wood byproducts from other companies.
But why would an Oregon charitable group choose a site hundreds of miles and a state away for its recycling program? You go where the mattresses are, Chance Fitzpatrick explains. Bay Area transfer sites, waste haulers, thrift agencies and recyclers receive more than 500 mattresses a day, he says, in contrast to the hundred or so a day they would collect at home.
SVdP of Lane County has a close cooperative relationship with SVdP in Alameda County (Oakland), and the mattress recycling facility is in an empty warehouse on the sister group’s property.
Finding Buyers
Where can you find potential buyers and sellers of recycled polyurethanes? One source is a recycled plastics market database put together by the Alliance for the Polyurethane Industry. API joined with the American Plastics Council (APC) to assemble this database, which can be found at www.polyurethane.org/s_api/sec_markets.asp.
The database contains nearly 1,700 North American recycling companies that deal in post-industrial and post-consumer polyurethanes. It can be searched to find buyers or sellers by type of polyurethane and by geographic areas and it offers expanded descriptions of the polyurethanes processed by a particular facility. For help using the the database, contact the APC helpline at 1 800 2-HELP-90 [1-800-243-5790].
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