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The typical mattress is a 60-pound chunk of fiber, foam and steel springs. Roughly 8,000 of them end up in American landfills every day. That amounts to nearly 175 million pounds of wasted material a year that slowly rots away there, taking up already diminished space. It’s a problem that some say requires a federal response, although there is no plan for now to institute mattress recycling on a nationwide scale. But some smaller efforts are inching forward. On Tuesday, for example, the international nonprofit group Enactus announced that students from Belmont University in Nashville had won the group’s Enactus World Cup for starting up a mattress recycling enterprise. The students’ project, called Spring Back Recycling, hired homeless people and former prison inmates to dismantle mattresses so the materials could be reused. Ryan Trainer, president of the International Sleep Products Association, which has pushed for the creation of a federal recycling initiative along those lines, said that such projects help call attention to the problem of discarded mattresses in the meantime.
Mr. Trainer said that only 30 or so retail recycling businesses around the country accept mattresses. They are usually far from city centers. he said, and most charge a recycling fee, which may prompt people to dump them in the street instead. Few recycling companies industries are attracted to urban areas because of the high cost of real estate and labor, he added. Another problem, said Barrie Brown, a mattress retailer who worked with Spring Back Recycling, is the resale of old mattresses disguised as new ones or newly recycled ones. “The used mattresses are recovered with low-cost fabrics and sold as new,” he said in an e-mail. “They merely cover all of the past sins and stains with a slip cover.” That tends to stir suspicions of both mattress retailers and recyclers, he said. So when it comes to mattresses, many cities skip the recycling option and fast-track them to landfills instead. Seeking to prevent that from happening to their own discards, plenty of city dwellers head to Internet forums for advice.
The suggestion often tends to be donating them to the Salvation Army or listing the mattress at a Web site like Freecycle, which offers up goods for reuse. Of course, some people are unwilling to sleep on a donated mattress because of the threat of bedbug infestation a common problem in cities including New York. While a mattress can be difficult to dismantle, many recyclers will argue that it is the best option of all. With its dense coils of steel, layers of fiber, and occasionally, wood, it is a rich source of reusable material. “The inner spring is of the biggest value – that’s the meat that you want to get out,” said Mr. Trainer, although he acknowledged that it was hardly a fortune. (A set of springs from an average mattress can fetch up to $3.50.) The coils are melted down and sold to steel companies. The foam and fiber are shredded and used in carpeting and insulation, and any wood can be handed over to a wood chipper. Ridding the material of dirt and bugs involves heating it to high temperatures, which can be expensive, however.
And the going price for steel fluctuates.. That’s why Mr. Trainer says that smaller projects like Spring Back Recycling should be scaled up and governments and businesses should support the efforts of the few recycling companies that do accept mattresses. Industry competition could drive down prices and help people rethink their waste cycles, he said.Buying a new mattress is not fun. You have to head to a mattress store, lay around on mattresses for longer than you’d like, haggle with a salesperson about an aggressively overpriced mattress, then wait for a delivery guy to show up weeks later. I ordered my last mattress online. It seems crazy, but it worked out well... mostly. Most of us are willing to order just about anything from the internet, but mattresses seem a little weird. For one, they’re huge and hard to ship, not to mention expensive. But more importantly, they’re one of those rare things that you really want to try before you buy. All mattresses are a little different, and your sleep is important.
Picking the right mattress can make a significant difference in how well you snooze. Yet, there’s a sameness in mattresses that’s hard to describe. Sit on a $5,000 mattress and a $1,000 mattress, and many of us can’t tell the difference. Even comparison shopping can be a pain since manufacturers sell exclusive lines to different retailers, meaning you have to hit up a number of different stores just to pick a mattress. Then, when you finally pick something you want, you’re expected to haggle over the price. Last year, The New York Times spend nearly 3000 words describing the Kafkaesque experience of shopping for a mattress.In short, buying a mattress is a huge pain in the ass. A couple of months ago, I needed a new mattress. I’m a heavy sleeper in that I can sleep on a rock, so the idea of testing dozens of different mattresses for some supposedly quantifiable level of coziness seemed absurd. So, I looked into purchasing one online.It turns out, there are a few options in this arena.
All of them offer generous return policies. Most of them are considerably cheaper than retail options, and all of them come with two added benefits that appealed to me instantly: no haggling and no salesperson BS. Buying online saves you the hassle of going to a bunch of retailers, dealing with a pushy salesperson, haggling down the price, and attempting to tell the difference between dozens of mattresses that all feel the same. It’s fast, delivers in a few days in a small box that’s easy to move around, has a 100 day trial to see if you really like it, and you can return it if it doesn’t work out. Your options are limited here, but that’s actually part of the appeal for me. I don’t want to make choose between dozens of options, I want just a few.I was surprised to find that there are quite a few companies selling mattresses over the internet. Here, I’m going to stick with a few startups that exist solely online as direct-to-consumer options. Direct-to-consumer means there’s no obnoxious salesperson and they’re set up to deal with shipping and returns easily.
It also means they’re a bit cheaper than comparable mattresses from mainstay companies like Sealy Serta. Most of these companies only make one type of mattress. They all have different sizes, but you don’t need to choose between a bunch of options for pillowtops or different firmness ratings. Most specialize in memory foam, but Saatva caries varying types of spring mattresses, so there’s something for everyone here. So, before we even get into it, it’s worth pointing out that memory foam (or whatever similar variation each company sells) mattresses aren’t for everyone as they tend to be a bit more firm and some people feel like they get a little hot. There are a few different direct-to-consumer manufacturers I looked at:Each company has different firmness and comfort levels. I went with Tuft & Needle because I prefer a firm mattress, and Casper is supposedly a bit more “pillowy,” while Leesa seems to fall somewhere in the middle. You can get a ton of info about different aspects of each of the above mattresses, including customer reported satisfaction levels about everything from how good they are for sex to how comfortable they are for heavyset people, over on Sleep Like the Dead.Okay, so here’s where things get weird.
At least in the case of both Tuft and Needle and Casper, the unboxing process is pretty bizarre. As you can see in the video above, you’ll essentially pull the mattress out of a box that’s far too small to fit a mattress, unroll it, then cut a slice in a vacuum sealed plastic wrapper to make the mattress expand. Then you’ll sit around and watch it expand for a couple hours. Since it’s foam that’s been sitting in a vacuum-sealed bag for a while, it smells a little weird at first, like a G.I. Joe sitting in boiling water. But the smell goes away after a couple of hours. The whole process is actually pretty fun to watch (at least compared to boredom of bringing home a normal mattress). It’s also pretty easy to get the mattress from your door to your bedroom because the box is so small. That means no finagling your way around crazy staircases or through tiny doorways. After the mattress expands and the smell goes away, you can get to sleep.Here’s the fun part: for about 100 days (in most cases), you get to just sleep on the mattress and decide how you feel about it.
Most traditional mattress stores have a 30 day return policy, but according to Sleep Like the Dead, most full refund policies come with fees ranging from $50-$500. Many also only offer store credit as opposed to a refund. Returns and refunds for all four of these direct-to-consumer companies are free and will refund you 100%, which is a pretty killer deal, all things considered. I’ve never actually had a new mattress as an adult. I’ve had barely used hand-me-downs from guest rooms, but never an actual, brand new, weird smelling mattress. So this whole trial period was an odd thing for me.As it turns out, a new mattress feels pretty much like my old mattress, except there’s no weird dip in the middle that sucks you in and attempts to suffocate you. The Tuft & Needle was, as reviews suggested, more on the firm side, which worked well for me. There’s no weird sinkage when you sit on it, even on the edge. Like most foam mattresses, there’s almost no motion transfer, so you barely notice if someone’s rolling around restlessly in their sleep next to you.
I slept well the first night and pretty much every night since (unless LAPD decided to hover over my place with a helicopter for a few hours searching out a suspect in a high speed chase, which it turns out no mattress can help with).Through the hundred day trial period, I tried to pay a lot of attention to how I felt about the mattress, but as time wore on, I cared less and less. This is a good thing. The mattress disappeared into my life and out of my brain, and when my calendar alarm went off reminding me that the 100 day trial was over, I shrugged it off and went back to what I was doing. This mattress, the one I’d spent almost zero brainpower to pick out, the one that I spent very little time shopping for, is fine. Which is what I want. I don’t want to think about it.As I discussed above, each of these companies packs in a pretty hefty warranty and an excellent return policy. It sounds great on the surface, but that doesn’t mean the whole process works for everyone. As for the return policy, it’s worth considering the amount of time you’ll have to dedicate to the whole process.
Once you get it set up in your house, you’ll get the trial period to try out the mattress, and if you don’t like it, they’ll come pick it up. I didn’t need to return mine, but judging by a number of reviews on Amazon (where each of these mattress companies sells directly if you don’t want to order from their web sites), even people who hated the mattresses had no problems returning them. Though, it’s important to note that the return policy through Amazon is only 30 days as opposed to 100 days from the manufacturer. You’ll have to shop for another mattress, sleep on the floor for a while, and go through the whole process of sitting around at your house and waiting for the UPS guy again. I work from home, so none of this mattered to me, but it’s something worth considering before you dive in. There’s a reasonable chance you will not like the mattress you chose, so make sure you’re okay with whatever hurdles you need to jump through to get it returned.There’s one big caveat with the warranties too.
A warranty is only as good as the company behind it, and since many of these manufacturers are new, they might not last. If the company goes under, so does your warranty. This is a pretty important thing to consider, so if you’re not comfortable losing that warranty, it’s probably not worth it.Finally, one of the appealing aspects of buying a mattress locally is that they’ll take your old mattress away for free. Obviously, this isn’t possible when it’s the UPS guy dropping of a giant box filled with a rolled up mattress at your house, so you’ll need to figure out a way to get rid of your old mattress. In some cities, you’ll just need to alert your waste management company ahead of time and they’ll grab it with your trash, but you may need to pay an additional fee. That said, for me, this was a great experience. I really didn’t want to exert much mental effort on picking out a mattress and this was a great way to do just that. I did get lucky in the fact that I ended up liking the mattress, but I’m also pretty sure that the decision wasn’t as important as I’d made it out to be.