Can't Sleep On It, Can't Donate it

A friend of mine recently needed to get rid of one of her mattresses. Her first thought - donate it. She called a number of local organizations to try to give this almost-new mattress to a worthy cause, but with no success.

My next thought was to recycle it. No success there either. However, I did learn a couple of things in the process.

First, in our time-starved world it can be really hard to follow through on your best intentions. I called one local charity at five different locations to find out if they would accept mattresses, but only received voice mail, disconnected numbers and "not at this location, try....". But I do believe that even though we can't hit a home run every time we can eventually make a difference if we at least try with each opportunity that presents itself, as my friend did.

The second thing I learned is that the folks that use the most mattresses - hotels and the like - also struggle with the same problem. Green Lodging News has an interesting article about a military base in South Carolina trying to find a solution for disposal of their 5,000 to 7,000 mattresses per year when the local landfill decided they would no longer accept them. Not solutions that will work for us at home, but it provides interesting perspective on the volume of the problem.
http://www.greenlodgingnews.com/Content.aspx?id=1276