The mattress accompanies us for years during our nights, it is a faithful and comfortable companion inside our home

When we bought it we didn't care, in detail, about how it was made, but we sat or lay down on it to decide whether it was comfortable or not.

Like all products, the mattress also has a useful life and, once its is over, it is replaced, passing it from our roommate to waste.

Yeah, I refuse. A waste composed of plastic, fabric, metals, foams, various paddings that make it a great resource of raw materials but which, even today, often ends up incinerated or in landfills.

Although the regulations speak clearly in terms of recycling and, despite the huge annual replacement volumes of the mattresses, which generate about 5 million pieces a year only in Italy, the circularity of the product is still very poor.

The mattress contains raw materials that are certainly recoverable in the fabric, metal and plastic industries through the recovery of polyurethane and foams .

So, technically, the almost complete recycling of the products is possible, but what is missing today, in a widespread way, is the transfer of the mattress in a dedicated supply chain and the industrial activities of the separation of components.

In addition, the industry must design and build mattresses whose components can, in the future, provide for simple, complete recycling at the lowest possible cost.

With a view to recycling this type of product, the interesting agreement between Basf and Neveon should be emphasized, which aim at the chemical recycling of the mattress at the end of its life.

This agreement aims to improve the circularity of the products, studying how to increase the recyclability of the individual components.

The foams that are inside the mattresses that have now become waste, are the object of the study for the chemical recycling of polyurethane which, according to Basf's intentions, they would return to regenerate a new raw material to produce new polyurethane foams.

Through the chemical recycling process, the resulting raw material is perfectly comparable, from a qualitative point of view, to a virgin of petrochemical origin, with an enormous advantage of waste reduction and environmental impact.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Article originarle in Italian.