The world is sleeping on a land fill problem—the recycling of mattresses.
Not only are they big and bulky, but there are millions of them thrown away every year. According to Europur (the European Association of Flexible PU Foam Blocks Manufacturers), more than 30 million mattresses are discarded each year in the EU alone. This means that if stacked on top of each other the pile would be more than 60,000 kilometres high. That’s one quarter of the way to the moon.
That is a massive pile of waste not being tapped into, with the Mattress Recycling Council (MRC), an American non-profit organization that assists with the responsible disposal and recycling of mattresses, even stating that less than 10% of mattresses in the US are recycled. This is despite 75% of an innerspring mattress being reusable for its raw material.
The fact is that most mattresses end up in land fill or are burnt. Due to their bulk, they take up a lot of land fill space (a problem), and due to the plastics used to make them, they create a lot of carbon emissions and toxic fumes (also a problem).
What is needed is a decent recycling program and process to put the issue to bed.
Fortunately, compared to other household items, mattresses are not too difficult to recycle. They’re all approximately the same shape and made of the same few materials—fabric, foam, and metal, plus wood, if a box spring is in the mix.
“It’s fairly simple to separate the components,” explains MRC research director Mike Gallagher.
Some of the materials are easy to recycle. The metal springs, for example, can be melted down and are usually used to make construction materials, while any wood used can be mulched. Textiles are mechanically recycled into the fibres used to make carpets, padding, insulating material, or other household items. IKEA, for example, has a program for collecting old mattresses and using the raw materials to make sofas.
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However, the hardest part to recycle are the polyurethane foams that make up the bulk of a mattress. “Polyurethanes are the most complex polymeric materials I can think of,” says Timothy Long, a polymer researcher at the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing at Arizona State University.
According to Long, the biggest problem is that polyurethanes are thermosets. Unlike polyethylene or other thermoplastics that people are accustomed to throwing in their recycle bins, thermosets are strongly cross-linked polymers that cannot be melted down and simply re-moulded. Recyclers need to change polyurethane foam chemically in order to do nearly anything other than cut it up and glue the pieces together to make cushioning.
However, the chemical recycling choices for mattress foam are limited to breaking down the polymer into its monomers (polyol and isocyanate) or avoiding the complete depolymerization by modify the polyurethane into a new raw material. Both approaches are a major challenge for chemical companies hoping to tap into a low-cost chemical resource.
Dow, for one, is a chemical manufacturer which has been developing mattress-recycling technology for more than eight years. In 2017, the company established a facility in Semoy, France, for what Andrea Benvenuti, a Dow associate director of global R&D, calls the first industrial-scale process for the chemical recycling of mattress foam. Dow chose France because of its well-established waste mattress collection program. So now, every year since 2021, the plant has recycled the polyurethane from as many as 200,000 mattresses.
“Dow’s process uses acids and alcohols to break down polyurethanes into polyol and amine compounds,” explains the chemical industry journal CE&N. “The amines are not recovered, but the recycled polyol can be mixed with fresh polyols and isocyanates to make new polyurethanes for furniture and packaging. Ultimately, those polyurethanes will contain about 10% recycled content.”
Similar efforts to depolymerize mattress foam have also been launched in Europe by BASF and Covestro. While BASF's method only recycles the polyol, Covestro is able to recover an isocyanate precursor in addition to polyol.
“It’s hard enough to efficiently recover the polyol and isocyanate components from a single polyurethane,” says organic chemist Troels Skrydstrup of Aarhus University. Skrydstrup is a member of a group of researchers working with Danish business partners, such as the mattress manufacturer Tempur, to develop more effective chemical recycling methods for polyurethane.
However, making the issue even more complex, is the fact that there are many different types of polyurethane. There are even other chemical products, such as flame retardants, dyes, and surfactants, present in mattresses which also need to be separated. “You can’t just go to a dumpster and take all the mattresses and think you can recycle them in the same waste stream into pure monomers,” notes Skrydstrup.
Clearly the challenge of recycling polyurethane from waste mattresses is complex, but at the same time it is not insurmountable. The chemical industry is making significant progress in developing innovative solutions, from advanced chemical recycling methods to more sustainable product designs aimed at closing the loop.
While technical and economic hurdles remain—such as scaling up processes, improving material recovery rates, and addressing logistical barriers—collaborative efforts between industry leaders, research institutions, and policymakers offer a promising path forward. With continued investment in technology and supportive regulatory frameworks, the chemical industry is poised to make mattress recycling a scalable and sustainable reality, reducing landfill waste, and contributing to a circular economy.
Hopefully then, the loop can be closed for raw materials from waste mattresses.
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