When you go through your research and shop endlessly for the right mattress to give you and yours years of restful nights - then your purchase is indeed a mattress that is a mattress.
After about ten or fifteen years the ability of your perfect mattress to provide you and yours the comfortable peaceful rest that it once did fades away.
Eventually you start the new mattress purchasing cycle over again as you seek to regain all the benefits that a good night's rest brings into your life.
When you purchase this new perfect mattress for you and yours, that first mattress you bought may well become excess and that is when a mattress is no longer a mattress - at least not to you.
The old mattress is now your disposal problem - what to do with it? While prudent people may well find a second use for the old mattress, such as letting someone in the family upgrade their bedding if the old mattress is better than what they currently have, making a few bucks or giving the mattress away on craigslist, donating it to a local charity, or as most folks end up doing, disposing of the old mattress in the local landfill.
We submit to you that disposing of your old mattress in the local landfill costs you a lot more money than you are aware of because of all the hidden costs.
What? Yes, hidden costs.
As a taxpayer, your taxes went to buy the landfill or as a customer of a private trash hauling company that owns and/or operates the landfill - a chunk of your monthly fees goes towards paying for that company's investment in the landfill property.
You also, one way or another, pay for the operation of the landfill and mattresses increase the cost of operating the landfill when their steel spring wires get tangled up in the landfill equipments' running gear.
Over time, some mattresses actually surface and have a cost to re-bury them.
Because bulk items like mattresses take up a lot of space in the landfill, the life of the landfill you paid for earlier is cut short and once again you will be paying for a new landfill so that trash does not pile up around your dwelling.
You've seen those images of New York when the City's Sanitation workers went on strike.
And, there are other hidden fees in the landfill and trash collection service overhead that no one other than a CPA could ever figure out for sure.
Thankfully, there are a handful of grass roots mattress recycling facilities that have sprung up to properly dispose of unwanted mattresses in an environmentally correct manner which also creates jobs.
The government has as of yet not stepped in like they did with used tire legislation and created a lawful system of proper mattress disposal that gets old mattresses off the roadsides and out of the landfills via recycling the cotton, felt, foam, steel and other reusable components of the mattress.
Several green mattress manufacturers have begun selling new mattresses that are more earth friendly (Meaning less toxic components in mattresses.
) and there is hope that some day in the future mattress manufacturers will be able to take back the old mattresses they sold years ago, recycle those old mattresses themselves, and after appropriate sanitation of the components, reuse the old mattress material to manufacture new mattresses.
The latter - all manufacturer method - approaches zero waste which benefits everyone in the loop as well as the environment.
Hold this thought, as it is the future.