The Journey of a Mattress

Arlington Recycle House is a mattress recycling facility located in a 22,000sf shared warehouse space in Arlington, WA, down a windy dirt road that is nearly impossible to find via any sort of GPS app. Mattress recycling became a thing in the King County area two years ago, when the County’s market development department (called Link Up and housed in King County’s Solid Waste Dept) decided to focus on mattress recycling as a market opportunity because of the volume of mattresses received at local transfer stations: 4.2M mattresses are estimated to be thrown out in the state of CA alone each year, generating roughly 130,000 - 190,000 metric tons of CO2. Because of this focus, most residential transfer stations allow consumers to drop-off mattresses for a small fee, which are then transferred to places like ARH for processing. 

Arlington Recycle House is as basic and efficient a mechanical recycler as they come. They process 200-300 mattresses per day, which come from individual consumers who pay $10 per piece (and who drive as far as Vancouver, BC to drop-off) or loads from transfer stations. ARH employs 20-25 FTEs, most of whom are formerly incarcerated individuals. 

At ARH, 98% of material taken in is diverted (meaning after the material is processed it is sold to a manufacturer for reuse) and only 2% goes back to the landfill. The types of material they process from mattresses are: Plastic film, shoddy cloth, steel wire, cardboard, foam, mattress toppers, cotton, and polyester. Most wood they generate from tearing apart mattresses is unable to be sold because it’s typically full of nails or already poor quality - so ARH pays $$ to get rid of it. 

Mattress recycling is a great example of why manufacturer end-of-life responsibility (also called product stewardship) is so important as a metric for real sustainability. If mattress manufacturers were responsible for even one aspect of product end-of-life, like not putting so many nails in the wood frames, how many metric tons of CO2 could that save per year?