EPR Strategies for Mattresses and Box Springs

Collection and reprocessing The main objective of EPR initiatives is to increase manufacturers’ financial and operational responsibility for the take-back, recycling, and final disposal of their products (Geyer 2004). In the previous section we concluded that mattress and box spring recycling and component reuse generates significant energy and greenhouse gas benefits.

We also learned that the vast majority of end-of-life, or end-of-use, mattresses and box springs are not collected for recycling and therefore likely to end up in landfills. The most important part of any EPR initiative for mattresses and box springs should therefore be to increase the end-of-life or end-of-use collection brate. In fact, setting minimum collection rates and recycling yields is a common part of many EPR policy measures (see e.g. Europe’s ELV and WEEE Directives). While collection rates are extremely low in California and the rest of the U.S., the recycling yields achieved by the recyclers are already 85 percent or higher. We think that only product redesign would be able to push recycling yields much higher than they already are. 

Because recycling operations are mostly manual, their environmental impact is minimal. As a result, the environmental impacts from mattress and box spring collection are more than five times higher than those of reprocessing. While the collection burdens are over an order of magnitude smaller than the avoided primary production burdens, EPR initiatives should make sure that collection is done as efficiently as possible. This essentially means to establish or support a collection and recycling infrastructure that uses efficient transportation modes, achieves high utilization rates, and keeps distances low, especially for low-efficiency transportation modes, like light duty vehicles. Picking up the old mattresses and box springs when new ones are delivered by retailers would be one obvious way to achieve high collection rates and efficient reverse logistics.

Product design 

An additional objective of EPR initiatives is to provide incentives to the producers to redesign their products in order to improve the operational, economic, and environmental performance of their end-of-life management. In the previous section we concluded that mattress and box spring recycling and component reuse generates significant energy and greenhouse gas benefits. We are therefore interested in identifying redesign opportunities that would increase the operational and economic feasibility of recycling and component reuse and increase the recycling and reuse yields. 

An important aspect of both recycling and component reuse is the disassembly of the mattresses and box springs into their individual components. Ease of disassembly affects the costs of recycling and reuse operations as well as their yields, which, in turn, affects the revenues of the recyclers. Mattress and box spring producers, as well as their suppliers, should thus be encouraged to consider end-of-life disassembly in the product and component design process. Overall it appears that mattress and box spring disassembly is already fairly easy, but there might be room for improvement, such as alternative joining and fastening technologies instead of staples. This should also increase the value of the wood, whose reuse and recycling is currently hampered by the staples. The reuse of the innerspring unit and the polyurethane foam might be facilitated by considering designs that increase the protection of those two components from inuse damage that would make reuse unfeasible. 

The one mattress component that currently does not have a secondary market is the insulator pad, which makes up a considerable part of the non-recycled material fraction that recyclers send to landfill. It would thus be environmentally beneficial to redesign the insulator pad in a way that makes it valuable as a secondary material or component once the mattress reaches the end of its life. Overall, redesigning mattresses and box springs for improved disassembly and recyclability should be able to increase their recycling yields from currently 85 percent to close to 100 percent. Redesign for component reuse might be able to increase the component reuse yield, which would further increase the energy and greenhouse gas savings from mattress and box spring take-back. 

Incentives from EPR programs would only be one of many drivers for product redesign and new product development, many of which are directly related to maintaining or growing the product market and maintaining or gaining market share. These other drivers may lead to product designs that make end-of-life management more challenging rather than easier. One example would be the widespread diffusion of electronic devices in mattresses and box springs. 

Not all EPR measures generate real incentives for product redesign, such as financial rewards that accrue only to those companies that increase the reusability or recyclability of their products. However, the question of which EPR program structures and details create what type and strength of redesign incentive is outside the scope of this study. This study only addresses the question of which product redesigns would help to increase end-of-life collection rates and recycling and reuse yields.