Mattresses, and the processing of mattresses, has been a topic of conversation in the waste and resource recovery sector in Australia for at least 15 years – and yet it’s still something that either requires an awful lot of manual process, or just isn’t getting good quality end uses for the materials that come from those mattresses.
We’ve recently met with Jane Street from Australian Bedding Stewardship council (ABSC) to discuss the opportunities of mattress processing across Australia, specifically in regional areas, and doubling down on the importance of regional collaborations.
As ABSC’s new accreditation program for mattress recyclers transitions to roll out, we were discussing the importance of ensuring it is using simple, easy to use language and focusing on repeatable processes, while making sure it can be audited at a low cost price point. After all, we don’t want the burden of making mattress processing better and improving the way that we manage the stewardship program to end up back on consumers!
In QLD this is a real issue, as the state has historically missed out on programs that have opened up and ran elsewhere in Australia, or had invested hope into programs that have spoken about getting to QLD but never did… There’s been hand shredding solutions for recycling materials from mattresses that proved to be unsafe – and the results end up being just a bunch of leftover mattresses doing nothing, going nowhere, and ending up in a hole in the ground.
An interesting development Jane mentioned, compounding the issue, is also the changing nature of the mattress market affected by COVID – people are moving to mattress in a box. These don’t have springs, so all the solutions they’ve been busy working on regarding extracting metal from the mattresses are now having to transition to solid foam products that unfold.
We think there’s a need for more of these types of cool conversations across the board, and this one was to see how we can work together to improve standard business approaches across the waste industry and how we can introduce the Stewardship Council to broader networks, specifically in regional QLD.
We are committed to supporting this business to grow across regions, as we are committed to supporting programs that we think are going to be successful to solve problems of waste.
Mattresses are our collective waste problem that we need to solve for, much like solar panels… and that’s something we’ve written about before, check out the article here.
