Over the course of one year, Eugene recycled enough mattresses to stack 10 Mount Hoods on top of one another. Laid end to end lengthwise, they could stretch from Eugene to Medford. St. Vincent de Paul processes 250 mattresses each day, harvesting recycled materials to send to a variety of industries. Employees wear clear safety glasses and neon T-shirts, ripping apart the worn out goods and organizing wooden frames in one pile and metal springs in another.
When the program first began, SVdP鈥檚 Executive Director Bethany Cartledge drove out to the landfill to count discarded mattresses herself, assessing Eugene鈥檚 need for the program. 鈥淟andfill workers were really shocked that they were seeing hundreds of mattresses every day,鈥� Cartledge said. 鈥淣ow, these landfills in particular are really happy to see them go away.鈥�
An estimated 15 million to 20 million mattresses are thrown away yearly nationwide. Their size, durability and the variety of materials used mean these beds clog up landfills and gum up equipment used to compact waste. With investments in sustainable practices, more components of mattresses are reusable.