OVER 370,000kg of annual waste could be diverted in Co Clare away from landfill by recycling mattresses, creating over 318,000kg of valuable recovered materials in the process according to social enterprise, Bounce Back Recycling (BBR).
Approximately 15,000 mattresses in Clare go to landfill or incineration every single year. “It costs around €180 for each mattress to be disposed in this way, which is a loss of around €2.7m to the local economy. Instead, we could actually be putting money back into the circular economy and creating green jobs by using the materials we produce by recycling mattresses,” BRR manager, Martin Ward explained.
Established in Galway in 2017 to create a viable solution for problematic bulky goods, BBR currently covers twelve counties, it aspires to extend this to include the entire Republic. “Ireland is fast running out of landfill space and bulky items like mattresses take up too much room. A mattress takes around 100 years to decompose, so it makes no sense to send it to landfill. When we recycle a mattress, we recover more reusable materials than shredding does,” Martin explained.
He added, “By 2025, at least 55% of municipal waste must be recycled to meet EU targets. Furthermore, within 13 years the amount of waste going to landfill must be reduced to 10% of all municipal waste. BBR we can help local authorities to achieve these targets”.
BBR administrator Nicola Devers insisted the public and private sectors need to act now to reduce mattress waste and turn it into a valuable resource instead via recycling. “Householders can play their part too, and we can help make it easier for them to get rid of old mattresses. Many people simply have no means of transporting a mattress for disposal. As one customer said to me, you can’t fit a mattress into a Nissan Micra”.
To date, BBR has helped customers divert over 70,000 old mattresses away from local civic amenity sites. “This is equivalent to roughly 1.75million kg of landfill waste,” Nicola remarked.
