Tidbits

Pope John Paul II was named an honorary Harlem Globetrotter in 2000.

The number of words posted each day on Twitter would fill a ten million page book.

The chance of dying on the way to purchase a lottery ticket are greater than the chance of actually winning.

Not True - The average mattress weight doubles every ten years from mites and mites poop.

True - There is a mattress sale every day of the year.

Recycling Mattresses

With increasing concern over our throw-away culture, many have asked what happens to those old mattresses and if there is any way to keep them from being in a landfill or incinerated with toxic consequences.

A mattress is one of the most difficult products to recycle due to its complex multi-material structure. One company is Massachusetts developed a minute-and-a-half process, which involves feeding a mattress through a large-scale shredder to break it apart and allow it to be magnetically separated into its individual parts, (foam, cotton, wood, and steel) for resale as raw materials. 

A typical mattress is a 23 cubic foot assembly of steel, wood, cotton and polyurethane foam. They have typically been difficult to recycle, and most municipal recycling facilities won't offer to do it for you.

St. Vincent de Paul Society has spearheaded one of the nation's most successful mattress recycling initiatives via its DR3 ("Divert, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle") program.

Mattress Facts

A ten year old mattress weighs double what it did when it was new, because of the debris which is absorbed through the years. That debris includes dust mites, their droppings and their decaying bodies, mold, millions of dead skin cells, dandruff, human hair, secretions, excretions, lint, pollen, dust, soil, sand and a lot of perspiration, of which the average person loses a quart per day.