Mesa County, CO Landfill to Start Recycling Mattresses

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage):  In order to fight a mattress and box spring problem that the Mesa County Landfill confronts every year, its managers persuaded the Mesa County Board of Commissioners to contract with a Front Range mattress recycling nonprofit, the only one of its kind in the state. Doing so not only will save the landfill money in dealing with the unwanted items, but also do away with something that takes up a vast amount of space.

The landfill’s annual intake of mattresses, which don’t compact like ordinary trash, can take up the equivalent of five Olympic-sized swimming pools a year, said Jennifer Richardson, director of the county’s Solid Waste & Sustainability Division. “In 2018, we did a waste audit to look at the types of trash that was coming through, and we noticed, ‘Boy, there’s so many mattresses coming in here,’” Richardson said. “We started tracking that, and found out that we’re seeing about 300 mattresses a week. Before that, mattresses were included in the tipping fee so we weren’t tracking them.”

At the time of that audit, the number of mattresses that came in was nearly 15,000, increasing by about 1,000 a year since then. Trying to deal with them was somewhat of a nightmare, too. Not only do they not compact like regular trash — the landfill takes in about 750 tons of trash a day — but when their springs break in attempting to do so, they often would get entangled in the axles of landfill equipment, which Richardson estimated cost the landfill up to $10,000 a year in repairs.

Courtesy: www.wasteadvantage.com