The process of mattress recycling involves cooperative participation by government, business enterprises and individuals. After all, mattress recycling by definition is indeed a cyclic process. To begin the cycle, on the supply side you have mattress manufacturers producing mattresses, these mattresses are then distributed and sold by businesses and on the demand side these mattresses are purchased by consumers. The recycling process is placed on hold as long as the consumer chooses to use the mattress.



When the consumer decides the mattress is excess to their use, the recycling process starts from collecting and processing of unwanted mattresses. The collection of mattresses differs from community to community. If you live in a community that has yet to formulate and legislate a mattress recycling program, then odds are very high that when you drive around your community you frequently see discarded mattresses beside the road, in open dumps and/or piled up against clothes and shoes donation collection boxes where they are not wanted. If this is your situation, then up until this moment - your community allowing open mattress dumping has not been your fault.

However, most communities collect them through the application of three primary methods, namely, drop-off centers, curbside trash pickup, and at the local landfill. Currently, most collection methods result in landfill deposition of used mattresses. Landfills are a precious and limited resource and putting mattresses in landfills takes up unnecessary space shortening landfill life and creates problems for landfill operation machinery with springs entangling wheels and axles, etc.

Some mattress recyclers address the machinery problems and some of the space requirements by grinding up the mattress into smaller, non-connected, pieces prior to placing them in landfills. This is costly and the same quantity of waste materials still goes into the landfills.

Several non-profit groups have seen the benefit of breaking mattresses down into their basic components and recycling each components for resale. This is quite commendable, and it introduces to you the obvious point that government needs to be involved in mattress recycling to make it work profitably. Government gives numerous tax incentives and tax exclusions to non-profits which as the wonderful Ben Franklin taught us, "A penny saved, is a penny earned."

So, now you know that you have the opportunity in your community to get a non-profit organization involved in mattress recycling and it may well solve your community's illegal mattress dumping problem.

If government has to be involved in mattress recycling to make mattress recycling work by for-profit businesses, is there a government role model to use that does not result in additional government invasion of your privacy and raising your income or sales taxes? The answer is yes and that example is the tire recycling process where there is a fee structure at time of purchase to fund future tire recycling and a fee to cover the cost of recycling current consumer owned used tires.

If you consider the mattress on your bed and what you would have to do to place your own mattress into the mattress recycling stream, it becomes intuitively and for that matter blatantly obvious to you that mattresses are a pain to move about the bedroom let alone some distance to a mattress recycling facility. So, the initial problem your government may wish to address is the high cost of transporting bulky mattresses from consumer locations to the mattress recycling facility. One short cut here is to mandate that businesses selling mattresses also collect the old mattresses. This centralizes the used mattresses at one place for the business and makes it more efficient to bulk haul used mattresses to the mattress recycling facility. If the business uses a large trailer the used mattresses can be stored in the dry trailer until the trailer is full enough to justify the trip to the mattress recycling facility. Also, your community may wish to use trailers at landfills and city-wide collection centers.

Once at the mattress recycling facility the mattress needs to be broken down into its recyclable components so that the recycler can sort the components into saleable products. This author submits to you that when government imposed fees include manually breaking down the mattresses into component parts that can be recycled is the end of the need for supplemental fees in the mattress recycling process. This is because the Recyler will receive income from the recycled mattress components especially from cotton, foam, felt and steel. (There are many other parts, but these four are the bread winners.)

So, what activities should these government fees cover and how large should these mattress recycling fees be? Government has a permitting and compliance cost, collecting and moving mattresses has a shipping and handling cost and manually breaking mattresses down into recycling components has a labor (Job creation) cost. The mattress recycling fee should cover these costs and additional costs - while perhaps necessary - should be evaluated and justified prior to being legislated into law.

Hope you learned that non-profit organizations are already successfully recycling mattresses and that with a reasonable fee structure for profit companies can also become sustainable enterprises doing mattress recycling just as tire recycling has already done.