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Winter is drawing to a close in the Northland, and the first signs of spring are beginning to pop out.
Buds are peeking out of the tips of tree branches. Birds are breaking into song. And colorful bits of abandoned waste are beginning to poke out of the snow drifts.

Everywhere you look is a broken piece of the car bumper that shattered in freezing temperatures, a fluttering chip bag dropped by clumsy mittens, or a whole pile of odds and ends from that one windy day when all the trash cans blew over.

And then there are the abandoned mattresses. Every spring they rise out of the snow drifts like beached whales on street corners and park sidewalks

More than any other abandoned bit of litter, a mattress sets the imagination spinning. Where did it come from? Who left it there?

A receipt might fall out of your pocket without you ever noticing. A cigarette butt might be tossed aside with barely a thought. But abandoning a mattress takes time and effort, and no one abandoning a mattress is having their best day ever.

Maybe their friend with the truck bailed on moving day, and they couldn’t make it to the Materials Recovery Center. Maybe they got to the MRC, saw the $25 disposal fee, and weighed the cost of proper disposal against the cost of putting dinner on the table.

Maybe they discovered bedbugs and hoped to stop their spread by throwing the mattress outside.
When a mattress is abandoned, disposal gets more complicated.

A mattress can double or triple in weight after a night out in the rain, and then it can quickly mold or become a home for pests. If it’s sitting on public land in Duluth, a message on the blight complaint form (duluthmn.gov/fire/blight-complaint/) can alert city employees to pick it up, but it’s a tough and time-consuming job to load it up for disposal at the landfill.

And a mattress that reaches the landfill still causes headaches.

Mattress springs - even those that feel like they’ve lost all ability to support your spine – resist being crushed by the giant, specialized steamrollers that smash our trash into the landfill.

The average mattress takes up 40 cubic feet of landfill space – a precious commodity made all the more precious now that the Superior landfill is only months away from being completely full.
In Duluth, we’re lucky to have another solution for mattress disposal.

If your mattress makes it to Resource Renew’s Materials Recovery Center (or MRC), it gets a second life.
Every day, about 24 clean, dry mattresses drive in loaded on trailers, stacked in truckbeds or even strapped to the top of sedans.

“We average about 4,875 dry mattresses per year,” explains Chase Poppenhagen, Resource Renew’s Solid Waste Services Manager.

Heidi Salls, Senior Transfer Station Attendant at the MRC, sees all these mattresses firsthand.
Another employee once told her that a mattress at the end of its life could weigh 35 pounds more from all the accumulated dust, dead skin cells, sweat and oils.

“Not sure if that’s accurate or not,” she says, “but I try not to think too much about it when I’m wrestling mattresses inside the bins.”

The magnitude of weight gain might have been an exaggeration, but mattresses do build up debris and allergens over time – one of the reasons why sources suggest that mattresses be replaced every 8 – 10 years.

Once they arrive at the MRC, mattresses are loaded into a covered bin for transport.

“It’s like playing Jenga with the different sizes,” Heidi says.

One past employee took the game to heart and fit 65 mattresses into one bin. “He always challenged us to try to beat his record,” says Heidi. “I don’t think anyone has!”

When the mattress bin is full, it travels to True North Goodwill’s headquarters on Garfield Avenue. There, staff deconstruct each mattress by hand into its constituent parts: wood, fabric, foam and steel springs.

“It’s a very obviously demanding job,” says Scott Vezina, True North Goodwill’s Director of Community Engagement, “but also a really good reentry job. The re-entry program is big for us. We have a lot of people coming out of justice involvement, and sometimes that’s a good first step.”

The structure, he says, gives them the skills and experience needed to secure other employment. The program supports the organization’s overall mission, Scott says, “inspiring personal transformation through the power of learning and career development.”

After the mattress is broken down into separate materials, they can each go on to a different recycling future.

The cotton covers go into Goodwill’s textile recycling program.

The foam is sent off to be shredded and reshaped into carpet underlayment or padding.

The wood used to become biofuel for Minnesota Power, but because the wood retains tiny bits of cotton particulate, burning isn’t a great solution.

“We’ve had some ideas,” Scott says, “but we haven’t gotten the operations off the ground yet in terms of how that material could be repurposed […] like stakes for political signs.”

Until the next great idea comes along, Goodwill stockpiles the wood.

Lastly, the steel springs are the most valuable part of a mattress, but also the most challenging to manage.

Mattress springs can’t be compacted by any typical machinery. Baling the springs into a form that’s easy to transport was a full-on engineering challenge when the program first started in 2008.

“We ended up getting a one-of-a-kind, first-of-its-kind coil spring compactor made specifically to take those springs and bale them,” Scott recalls.

Three mattress springs can load into the baler at a time, and they’re crushed into a 3-foot cube weighing 60 to 90 pounds.

From there, the baled springs move on to ME Global Foundry in Gary New Duluth, where they are melted down and recycled into new steel products.

Goodwill earns about $300 per ton of steel springs, which offsets the lion’s share of the labor and logistics of the whole mattress recycling program.

About a third of the mattresses Goodwill recycles come from Resource Renew’s MRC – the rest come from other partners around the state or arrive directly from large entities like hotels and university dorms.

In total, True North Goodwill processes 18,000 to 20,000 mattresses annually. 

“Over the course of the time, it’s been something like 325,000,” Scott says.

Still, there are thousands of mattresses that can’t be recycled: the ones infested by pests, dumped in a ditch or covered in mold from years in a damp basement. But each mattress that makes it to the MRC is a step in the right direction, recycling steel, cotton, foam and wood back into our economy rather than taking up space in the landfill.

If you or anyone you know is facing barriers to proper disposal, reach out to Resource Renew at 218-722-3336 or info@resourcerenew.com to learn more and connect with resources.

Emma Pardini is the Sustainability Specialist at Resource Renew (formerly known as the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District or WLSSD). She specializes in education and communications around recycling and solid waste reduction.