Mattress recycling company opens in Dartmouth

A Montreal businessman hopes to keep tens of thousands of mattresses out of Nova Scotia landfills by tearing them up and selling the parts for scrap.

Abdul Erdem says his new company Greenload in the Burnside Industrial Park could eventually recycle hundreds of mattresses a day. 

Erdem founded what he says was Canada's first mattress recycling operation in Montreal in 2007. He sold that business in 2011 and plans to launch his Nova Scotia operation on Friday. 

"Ninety per cent of the mattresses are recyclable. We use the foam, the felt, the spring, the fabric, everything basically. Wood as well," he said.

Erdem says it takes about 10 minutes and a box cutter to separate a mattress or box spring into its component parts.

He says there's a market for all of it. Springs are melted down for scrap, foam is shredded to make carpet underlay, fabric fibre is recycled, wooden frames can be chipped and burned in biomass generators.

Erdem says he can handle mattresses in almost any condition. But they have to be dry because of mould concerns.

"The mattresses we want to receive, it has to be 100 per cent dry," he said. "It's not recyclable once it's wet."

Erdem says initially most of his mattresses will come from hotels or mattress retailers.

"Big companies like Sears, the Bay, the Brick, they have pickup service when they sell a new mattress," Erdem explains."What they do, they stack them in an empty trailer. So when the trailer is full, they bring it here to us and we recycle for them." 

Greenload will also offer a $20 mattress pickup service in the Halifax area. Erdem plans to set up mattress drop-off trailers in other parts of the province. 

The enterprise has the support of Nova Scotia's Resource Recovery Fund Board.

CEO Jeff MacCallum says Nova Scotians throw away roughly 77,000 mattresses a year.

He says they pose a challenge for landfills because they don't compress well, and can even pop up out of the ground after they've been buried.

Erdem says he can handle 400 a day

MacCallum says the RRFB has given Greenload $16,500 to help buy a foam bailing machine. He says more funds for equipment could come available as the operation expands. 

Erdem says he's ready for the challenge.

"We could handle in this location up to 400 mattresses a day," he said. "We could always extend in case we will have more volume."

For Greenload to access large volumes of mattresses, Erdem would like to see them banned from landfills. He'd also like to see recycling fees added to mattress sales.

"We want the government to make a law for us so we can take care of the problem," he said.

Nova Scotia Environment Minister Randy Delorey says the government is considering adding mattresses to the Extended Producer Responsibility program, the system currently used for consumer electronics.

"That would be the intent that we'd be looking at," he said.

"And of course we want to make sure before we implement final regulations that a system is able to be developed and in place that works well both both in meeting our environmental goals, but also that works with industry. So it has to be a feasible solution."