On March 24, Gov. Kate Brown signed into law a statewide mattress recycling program. The question that remains is, how does one recycle a mattress?
According to Zero Waste Wisdom, an average mattress can take up around 40 cubic feet of space when tossed into a landfill. With approximately 15 to 20 million mattresses being thrown into landfill each year in U.S., that means Americans are contributing 132,000 square miles of added garbage that could be recycled.
However, recycling a mattress is not easy.
“We tried shredding the mattresses and that didn’t work,” Terry McDonald, the director of Lane County’s St. Vincent de Paul, said to KLCC. They also tried air and water knives, and a grinder. “That started a lot of fires.”
Now, the organization disassembles about 50 mattresses each day – recycling up to 90% of the materials.
Beginning in 2024, a fee will be added to the cost of every mattress sold in Oregon to pay for a statewide collection and recycling program. The program will aim to be convenient for all areas of the state, and will require mattress manufacturers to be involved in the details of how the collection system will work.
“Adding mattresses to the products covered by Oregon’s EPR [Extended Producer Responsibility] programs will provide a much-needed service in both urban and rural communities throughout the state,” said Abby Boudouris, senior legislative analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) in the press release concerning Brown signing the law.
This law was moved through the legislature as Senate Bill 1576, with its chief sponsors being Sen. James Manning of Eugene, Sen. Michael Dembrow of Portland, Sen. Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro, and Rep. Janelle Bynum of Clackamas.
Oregon is the fourth state to enact a program like this.
By Sally K Lehman
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