What to Do with a Discarded Mattress
September 23rd, 2008 -- Posted in Natural Mattress | No Comments »Chances are if you have a natural latex mattress, you won’t be sending it off to the landfill any time soon. After all, they have a lifespan of about 20 to 30 years.
But if you are ready to dump a conventional mattress, and Sean Leow of PSFK Shanghai says that 40 million mattresses do get trashed yearly, here is an inovative way to discard of that mattress. In his article, “Discarded Dreams: Used Mattress Competition,” Sean writes about a competition:
While re-use and recycling may focus on many of the daily items we use and consume, there are bigger ticket items that may get forgotten. Every year 40 million mattresses get thrown in the trash and their construction is by nature hard to dispose, causing landfills to pile up with tons of useless materials.
Architecture for Humanity and Rubicon National Social Innovations are invite entrants to create innovative ways of converting used mattresses into useful products. The competition aims to encourage entrants to form groups capable of creating a consumer product, instructions detailing how to make the product, and a plan for production on a larger scale. Entrants must create designs that take into account the volume of mattress waste generated each year. Groups are encouraged to utilize local resources, including existing manufacturing facilities and other waste products.
This is so cool! Just as we use recycled plastics to make new products (like turning soda bottles into park benches), taking the resources found in mattresses and repuposing the materials into new consumer products is a great idea.
Follow the natural latex harvesting to processing to shipping on this informative video.