Your store can be a better choice for shoppers, if you can take their old mattress when they buy a new mattress from you. It saves householders the challenging task of trying to get a bulky old mattress to a local civic amenity site. But Bounce Back Recycling has a wider environmental appeal too, because we deconstruct the mattresses by hand. This produces a higher rate and quality of recovered materials than mechanical recycling does.
Under our mattress recycling service to furniture retailers we:
- Remove old mattresses from your store location
- Collect regularly every month or on demand
- Provide a container on site for storing mattresses awaiting collection, if required, for your convenience.
We already partner with retailers like Harvey Norman to provide this service. To date, we have helped them recycle over 80 tonnes of old mattresses and bed bases from just 3 of their stores. This diverts the mattresses and bed bases away from local civic amenity sites. So, these bulky items are not going to landfill, which is great for our environment.
Why It’s Important to Recycle Mattresses
Mattresses that end up in landfill take up to 100 years to fully decompose. They only start to decompose after 15 years, and steel springs take over 50 years to decompose. But elements such as polyurethane foam (PU) can take up to 100 years to decompose.
It costs around €180 to send just one mattress to landfill, because they take so long to decompose, and it costs so much to maintain landfill sites. In County Galway alone, around 32,500 mattresses go to landfill or incineration in every year – an estimated loss of over €5.8m to the local economy. If even half of those mattresses were recycled instead, that’s a saving of almost €3m to our economy.
There are environmental savings too. Recycling reduces the demand for landfill which helps protect our forests, rivers, lakes and wetlands, which are natural habitats for wildlife.
Get in Touch
If you like to hear more about how we can help your furniture store or chain, contact us here or phone us on 091 760877
Case Study: Harvey Norman
Bounce Back Recycling has been working with Harvey Norman stores in Cork, Galway and Sligo since 2022. They collect old mattresses from their customers in these areas when they deliver the new ones to them. Then we collect all these old mattresses from the Harvey Norman store and remove them for recycling.
The mattresses are recycled at our depot in Galway. All mattresses are taken apart by hand and all materials are either re-used or disposed of ethically. The materials recovered from our recycling process can be used for a range of other products. These include using soft materials for making carpet underlay, and potentially, home insulation products. The metal springs can be recycled for use in the steel industry.
General Manager of Harvey Norman’s bedding department, Robbie Auckram, says their joint recycling efforts with BBR are worth over €625,000 to the local economy. “We have been working with BBR since June 2022 and are delighted with the results. Our stores in Galway, Sligo and Cork now use BBR to collect mattresses and recycle them. This means customers can have their old mattresses collected when they are receiving new ones. It also means our customers know their old mattresses are being disposed of in a sustainable manner.”
