Despite the numerous challenges with waste collection during COVID, the Yolo County Integrated Waste Management Division celebrated five years of offering free recycling of mattresses and box springs at the Yolo County Central Landfill, in partnership with the Mattress Recycling Council (MRC). “We are proud of our dedicated landfill staff making Yolo County greener and cleaner,” said Yolo County Board of Supervisors Chair Jim Provenza. “Recycling nearly 65,000 mattresses to date, equating to 1,934 tons diverted from our landfill, shows our commitment to implementing programs that are easily accessible for proper disposal to reduce illegal dumping in our community.”
Through MRC’s Bye Bye Mattress partnership, 64.8 million pounds of material were kept from landfills statewide last year, 3.9 million pounds of which came from Yolo County. The program’s recyclers achieved a 77.1% recycling rate – the highest in the program’s history. When a mattress or box spring is brought to the Yolo Landfill, it is loaded and transferred to a local processing plant in the industrial part of Woodland, where the fabric is stripped and sanitized to be made into products such as spray insulation, the wood frames are broken down for energy production at a biomass plant and the metal springs are sent off for scrap metal recycling. Each year, MRC actively invests in research projects to identify new end markets and create program efficiencies to drive incremental improvements in the recycling rate.
“MRC was created to efficiently divert mattresses from landfills by developing a comprehensive and diverse collection network that is available and accessible to all Californians, ” said Mike O’Donnell, MRC’s Managing Director. “This is especially important in communities that experience higher instances of illegal mattress dumping.”
Since the program started in California in 2016, more than 7 million mattresses have been recycled in the state and more than 230 million pounds of material have been kept out of landfills.