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Mattress Recycling – Where To Take Your Old Mattress

With the increasing concern of people for their rest and the need to provide the best for it, lots of people are showing a rising interest for modern mattresses. These mattresses, which are made usually of memory foam or latex foam have shown great properties that make them really appealing for the even regular customers, not to say for allergic individuals or other people with particular needs that had to look for other solutions to their sleeping problems in the past.

However, in all this modern mattress frenzy, the last thing owners of new mattresses worry about at the moment of purchasing them is what exactly are they going to do with the ones they owned and that they don’t need anymore.

Well, according to many sources, the average lifespan of any given mattress should be around ten years, give or take depending on the usage. So, when the time comes to get rid of their old mattresses, the first thought that comes to the minds of most owners is to just take them to a landfill in order to dispose of them. However, what most people don’t know is that landfills can charge some hefty amounts in order to allow owners to drop off their mattresses there. And what makes things even worse is that there are some landfills where not even a fee is accepted: they will just deny access to anyone trying to drop his/her mattress off.

Well, to start, the first thing that any owner of an old mattress should do is to take a quick look at his/her local stores to see if they would buy all or any part of the old mattress, this is a good way to make profit of something that otherwise would have ended in a landfill anyway. Also this small “research”, even if it doesn’t provide the mattress owner with a place where to sell his/her mattress to, at least might provide other options, such as knowledge of places where the mattress can be recycled for example.

If you don’t think that recycling a mattress will cause much of a positive impact, think twice: any given recycling factory will be able to reuse more than 90% of an old mattress. Be it cloth, cotton, the springs, or any other element from your old mattress, almost nothing is thrown away. Of course, there is always the option to refurbish it and donate it to a charity institution, but this is becoming a decreasing practice and is not even allowed on some regions.

Besides these conventional practices, there are also other, more informal ways in which to take advantage of your old mattress. For example, the owner might take it apart by him/herself and start disposing of its different elements separately and maybe even put some of them to use, like the still-functional springs for example.

If all else fails, owners should also contact the companies where they bought their new mattress from, since the most experienced and professional, like Select Foam for example, will definitely have some relevant information regarding any recycling sources or might even take care of it themselves.

In any case, by all means try to avoid just throwing away an old mattress. In most cases it will still have usable elements and it might even provide you, the owner, with some unexpected, but certainly welcome rewards.