Mattress toss in Lake LA

Lake Los Angeles – In this community, the mattress and box spring collection on Saturday October 14, 2023, was a success thanks to so many of you bringing the discarded mattresses to the road yard and homes. Shortly after closing time, the trailer was loaded and the mess left our area.

The pictures tell it all. This filthy mess is off our roads and not causing driving to be more dangerous because of the good people who cared enough to bring them to the drive. The road yard crew also helped to clear the roads and neighborhood streets of these nuisances.

The actual count will be available at a later date. LLA traditionally has always produced a significantly large number.

When you recycle your mattresses and box springs, lots of good comes out of it besides the obvious. A Mattress Recycling Council (MRC) funded pilot project with a commercial composter in Gilroy, CA, found that cotton and coconut fibers (coir) can be successfully composted with other organic yard waste for use as a soil amendment.

Currently, about 1,300 tons of cotton and coir fibers are annually extracted from California mattresses and most of these fibers are landfilled due to lack of secondary markets.

• The many problems associated with illegally dumped mattresses and box springs are

• Discarded mattresses are a visual blight to residential streets and end in landfills.

• They present a serious health hazard to the community.

• It causes extraordinary expenses when the County has to pick up these discards off the roads, which also makes for a road hazard situation.

• Road maintenance operations are negatively impacted when time is spent picking up mattresses.

• It’s expensive for all of us! Municipal financial losses occurred are due to the inefficient processing and landfill expenses of mattress disposal. Mattresses are hard to compact, and the springs can easily catch in equipment normally used in landfill and incinerator operations.

How the recycle works is: Mattresses and box springs are first placed on a conveyor belt. There special saws cut away soft materials on the top and bottom. This separates the polyurethane foam and cotton fiber from the framework. Then metal pieces are magnetically removed. Metal springs from box springs are then extracted and sent to scrap recyclers that sell the metal to steel mills and foundries. The remaining materials are shredded, baled and compressed for transport to scrap dealers and other companies that will use them to make new products. The process of disassembling a used mattress has become extremely efficient. It now takes one worker only about 3-4 minutes per mattress.

Mattress recycling conserves resources by reusing steel, foam and other materials in order to produce new products. It reduces reliance on incinerators and saves valuable space at landfills. Also, landfill equipment problems created by mattress springs can be greatly reduced. Being able to recycle mattresses greatly reduces the amount of illegally dumped mattresses while having the added benefit of creating more recycling jobs.

The beauty of this collection program is over 80% of each mattress can be recycled in to other useful products. No mattresses collected at these roundups will be sold to renovators.

The next mattress and box spring collection will be on Saturday October 28, 2023, from 9:00AM to 2:00PM at the Public Works Yard #557, 38126 Sierra Highway in Palmdale, CA 93550.

Photo courtesy of Vladimir Gomez

By Shirley Harriman