Labor Implications

In 2010, North America’s largest mattress recycler processed about 55,000 mattresses and 55,000 box springs with a staff of 15 fulltime employees (DR3 2012). This translates into one fulltime employee to process around 7,300 units (mattress or box spring) per year. We estimate that 4.2 million units of either mattresses or box springs are discarded in California every year, but less than 5 percent are recycled. This means that currently fewer than 30 fulltime employees work in mattress recycling. The recycling of all 4.2 million units would require around 575 fulltime employees. Additional jobs would be created in the industries that process the secondary outputs of the mattress recyclers, i.e. the steel scrap, the polyurethane foam, the cotton, the cover (toppers), and the wood.

EPR measures that lead to the collection and recycling of 4.2 million mattress and box spring units per year are therefore estimated to generate in the order of 1,000 jobs, most of which are entry-level positions.

As we described earlier, the environmental benefits of reuse and recycling activities come from avoided landfill and, more importantly, from displaced primary production activities. So, while increased collection, reuse, and recycling of mattresses and box springs will create jobs in those sectors, avoided landfill and primary production activities could potentially reduce the number of jobs in the affected sectors. However, while reuse and recycling activities are very laborintensive, activities like landfill operation, steel, foam, and cotton production are highly automated and have very high labor productivity. We thus estimate that the labor loss from displaced economic activities due to increased collection, reuse, and recycling of mattresses and box springs would be negligible. 

Conclusions 

Currently, most end-of-life mattresses and box springs are landfilled or dumped illegally, even though at least 85 percent of their mass can be readily reprocessed into useful secondary resources. Current reprocessing practices focus on material recycling, which is estimated to offset roughly 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from production and landfill of mattresses and box springs. About two-thirds of the greenhouse gas benefits come from the recycling of the steel innerspring unit, and another 25 percent from the recycling of the polyurethane foam. 

Reusing instead of recycling the innerspring unit and polyurethane foam would increase the offset to around two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions from the production and landfilling of mattresses and box springs. The reuse of entire mattresses and box springs faces significant hygienic issues and would also only generate significant greenhouse gas savings if the reused products would successfully compete with new ones, which is not in the economic interest of original mattress and box spring manufacturers.