Mattress recycling in Western Australia

Garbologie's big announcement

Yesterday I accepted the keys for a small warehouse at 5/30-32 Stockdale Road, O'Connor. That little warehouse will house a mattress dismantling and recycling business. It will be the start of a network of recycling operations.

Garbologie's new mattress recycling warehouse

I will be drawing on my experience in establishing a small recycling plant in Victoria, and then the first mattress recycling plant in Western Australia (the Hazelmere Recycling Centre when I was at the EMRC).

Garbologie will accept mattresses from anybody for a small fee, and for a slightly larger fee, will collect mattresses. We'll also be looking to spread the word with Councils, introducing dedicated mattress collection runs into verge collections. We will be the premier mattress recycler in Perth.





We will manually dismantle mattresses, and in the first instance will recover the springs and the foam for sale (springs as scrap metal, foam for use in carpet underlay). The top cover (typically a synthetic fibre blend) is more difficult to recycle, and so we'll need to work out a recycling business there. Maybe there are some clues in a patent to separate polyester from cotton.

For more on how to dismantle a mattress, you can read my post How do you recycle a mattress?

It all starts in June, and is very exciting. Expect more to be written about the journey to establish a mattress recycling plant. After all, this is our journey, and hopefully my experiences can help others to follow.

The State Government gets in on mattresses too

It's been quite busy on the mattress front alongside Garbologie's work.

In mid April the Western Australian Waste Authority made available a document entitled Review of options for a pilot project to increase recycling of mattresses from the residential sector in the Perth & Peel regions of Western Australia. The report is dated 28 November 2012.

The combination of waiting almost 5 months to release and the total silence on its release suggests that the report will go nowhere. It is available at the Waste Authority website

What does it conclude? 

First, it concludes that about 145,000 mattresses go to landfill each year of an estimated 165,000 thrown out. Only 12.9% are recycled.

Mattress recycling. Source: MPR

These numbers mean that mattresses in landfill are estimated to consume nearly 110,000 cubic metres of landfill airspace. Each year. That is, each year, a cube 50 metres in each dimenson.

The final conclusion is that airspace is estimated to be worth over $10m for landfill operators, and is filled with mattresses to earn less than $220,000.

From here the report goes on to talk about a suite of government subsidy programmes, considering subisidies such as:

• $7.50 per mattress to accredited mattress recycling facilities
• $5.00 per mattress to accredited mattress drop-off facilities (waste sites) for subsequent consignment to recyclers
• $35.00 per mattress to councils to recycle mattresses from verge collections
• $35.00 per mattress to retailers to divert mattresses from landfill

If these were successful, they could be extremely expensive.

Imagine a sharp increase to 100,000 mattresses recycled. Instead of rejoicing, there would be gnashing of teeth as subsidies ranging from $500,000 to $3.5m fly out the door. You'd see all sorts of backyarders setting up shop, and then the bubble burst as the funding is pulled.

No, these subsidies don't seem a wise use of funds.

There are then medium term options suggested:

• Support separate collection systems for recovery of mattresses
• Support systems for charities to collect mattresses
• Ban mattresses to landfill

Each of these (except for bans) also involve state government subsidies. So there is the risk, again, of large chunks of money sailing out the door.

What to make of this?

Well, the report seems to miss a really big point. Mattresses in landfill are inefficient for landfills. There is a significant opportunity cost to the landfill operators (probably closer to $4m than the $10m in the report, but still large).

Why wouldn't landfill operators sort this out themselves? And why should taxpayers fund a programme to make landfills make more money?

Landfill. Source: Wikipedia

Which begs the obvious question. Why are landfill operators not dealing with this already?

Well, some do charge for mattresses, but to a relatively small extent. It is not usual for customers to be charged for a mattress if it is not reported at the weighbridge. The general approach is to charge residential customers bringing mattresses in with their trailer load of waste.

But the larger reason why not is that most landfill operators either don't know or don't care about the foregone income. Or, if they do, they have some fear of illegal dumping if they charge too much for mattresses. Both can be dealt with pretty readily.

What would you do Adam?

I never thought you would ask!

I would not subsidise the recycling of mattresses, even though subsidies would immensely benefit Garbologie in the short term. In the longer term, that benefit would be deadly, a sugar fix, a rapidly inflating bubble.

Instead, I would sit down with landfill operators and explain the loss they are incurring, and give them an opportunity to sort it out through their pricing. I would expect operators to charge a flat fee for every mattress delivered, reported or not.

I would tell them that, if they cannot act in their own interest, the State would introduce a tax on every mattress disposed of at landfill. The landfill can then work out a way to ensure every one is counted and the tax paid.

What now?

So I think that the report will go nowhere because it shouldn't go anywhere. Not to discount the work of the authors - they wrote the report in next to no time. They pulled together a very large amount of information into one place. That is valuable.

Their conclusions were guided by the people they spoke with, many of whom would gladly receive taxpayer money. That would be bad policy in this case. Here is an example screaming out for the market to solve.

It is into that space, as a participant in an entrepreneurial space, that Garbologie will solve the mattress recycling problem.