Mattress Recycling Birmingham AL

Mattresses are a heavy burden on landfills. Each mattress takes up about 23 cubic feet of space. Mattresses do not degrade well, and they can create dangerous "soft spots" in landfills.

Re-built or re-used mattresses find their way to the poor. Thrift stores often serve as retail outlets for re-built mattresses. But the overwhelming majority of used mattresses are not suitable for re-use for health and sanitation reasons.

Currently, there are only three large-scale mattress recycling plants operating in the U. S.: Conigliaro Industries (a private firm in Framingham, Massachusetts), the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Oregon, and the Northeast Minnesota Mattress Recycling Program, a facility near Duluth operated in partnership by the Western Lake Superior Sanitation District and Goodwill Industries.

Founded in 1990, Conigliaro Industries is located about 17 miles southwest of Boston. Its plant has a capacity of 150,000 mattresses per year, enough to accommodate all of the discarded mattresses in the state of Massachusetts. But its mattress recycling plant operates at 25 percent of capacity. The company recycles mattresses along with 150 other materials. Mattresses are classified as "difficult" for a number of reasons.

Mattresses and foundations are built to last 10 or 20 years, so they are extraordinarily difficult to deconstruct. While the metals in mattresses are enjoying high prices now, the other materials, mostly felt and polyurethane foam, have very volatile, low-price markets. Sometimes foam will fetch 50 cents a pound; at other times, Congiliaro cannot find buyers at all.

Generally, Conigliaro charges a fee of $8 to $18 to accept a mattress for recycling. It is the only way to pay for the labor-intensive deconstruction process, and most consumers who are interested in recycling are willing to pay it.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society established its 26,000 square-foot mattress recycling plant near Oakland, California, which serves a nine-county region. (The society has another mattress recycling plant near Eugene, Oregon.) About 350,000 mattress sets are discarded per year in that area. Of those, about 10 percent are re-used, 20 percent re-built, and another 10 percent are deconstructed and recycled.

Unlike Conigliaro, which accepts mattresses from the public, St. Vincent de Paul gets its mattresses from city and county collectio...