The production of a new double mattress creates a carbon footprint which is roughly equivalent to a petrol car driving 300 miles from London to Newcastle.*
Several factors influence the carbon footprint. Some mattresses are imported, whilst others are made in the UK. Mattresses also use a variety of different materials. Some studies suggest that natural cotton has a lower impact than manmade polyester.**
As well as the emissions from production, the disposal of old mattresses has a vast environmental impact. The UK throws away 20,000 mattresses every day and only about 19% of mattress materials are recycled (that is 2017 data, but it’s the most accurate figure we could find).***
If all the mattresses thrown away in the UK each year were laid end to end they would stretch from the UK to Australia. If they were stacked on top of each other, they would be more than 200 times the height of Mount Everest.****
It’s a big problem!
What can we do about it?
We think a good first step would be for each mattress sold in the UK to come with details of its carbon footprint – including the emissions from manufacturing and transport. A handful of mattress companies already offer some of this information (Hypnos, for example, offer details of their total carbon footprint) but many don’t and there is no obligation to do so.
This move certainly wouldn’t solve everything. It doesn’t address the elephant in the room which is disposal and recycling. However, we think that giving details of carbon emissions to shoppers will help them make informed decisions when they are deciding which mattress to buy.
We are trying to get 833 signatures – one for every mattress thrown away during one hour in the UK.
Where do I sign?
If we want to add your name to the petition, please visit Change.org
Why do I care?
We are trying to cut down our carbon footprint at home by changing simple things. It’s a work in progress but we’ve cut down the amount of meat we eat, reduced our car journeys, reduced our waste going to landfill and so on.
A few years ago I worked for an environmental charity and I’ve also worked as a journalist and run this website. I started researching a guide to environmentally friendly mattresses and saw the scale of the problem. Without good data, accurate comparisons are very difficult. What is greenwash and what is a genuinely environmentally friendly mattress? Labels with more information would be a good start in clearing the fog.
How we worked out the figures above
*According to the Furniture Industry Research Association, the production of a double mattress creates an ‘Estimated average carbon footprint’ of 79 kg CO2. (A Study Into The Feasibility Of Benchmarking Carbon Footprints Of Furniture Products, 2011). That’s a similar amount of CO2 produced by a petrol car with an MPG of 40 travelling for 300 miles. We used the Fleet News carbon calculator.
**According to a report by the Furniture Industry Research Association (A Study Into The Feasibility Of Benchmarking Carbon Footprints Of Furniture Products, 2011, p27 ), ‘polyester wadding is estimated to have a carbon impact that is more than double that of cotton based wadding.’ The report also says that ‘polyurethane foam has an estimated lower footprint than that of Visco-elastic foam, by approximately 20% assuming the same weight’. Visco Elastic Foam is another name for ‘memory foam’.
***The 20,000 figure is from the National Bed Federation’s End of Life Mattress Report 2019, which says that 7.3 million mattresses were disposed of in 2017. The Furniture Industry Research Association in 2020 give a slightly higher figure of 22,000 per day (https://www.fira.co.uk/member-news/[email protected]/shaping-up-to-a-healthier-future) . The 19% figure is from the End of Life Mattress Report by the National Bed Federation, July 2019. It refers to data from 2017, which is the most recent reliable data we could find.
****We calculated this by multiplying the length of a double mattress (190cm or 0.0019km) by the number of mattresses thrown away each year in the UK (7.3 million, according to the National Bed Federation’s End of Life Mattress Report 2019). That makes a total length of 13,870km. London to the North West coast of Australia is 13,773km.
To calculate the height, we multiplied the number of mattresses thrown away (7,300,000) by 25cm (or 0.00025km) which is a typical depth for a mid-priced mattress. Some mattresses are as thin as 15cm, whilst others are as much as 37cm deep, so this is only an approximate figure. This gave a total height of 1825km. Everest is 8.849km. 1825Km divided by 8.8849 is 206.2 but we have rounded down to 200 as the depth figure is an estimate.