Where do broken mattresses go?The number one hit song "Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” sung by the late Whitney Houston in February 1988, begs the question, “Where Do Broken Mattresses Go?”
You can’t have a hotel without beds, and beds need to be kept in good condition which means a fairly regular cycle on updating mattresses. To begin with, experienced hotel Housekeepers make sure that new mattresses are rotated on a regular basis to prolong the life of the bed thus ensuring that the hotel guest gets the best sleep possible. It is therefore common practice to flip and rotate mattresses every three months or so. Some mattress such as the memory foam type, crafted out of specific layers that should not be flipped, still required that it be rotated as well. Cost conscious Housekeepers valued this practice as it lengthened not only the life of the mattress, but also stretched the high investment.
How long is too long for a hotel to keep its mattresses? A high-quality hotel with consistently robust strong annual occupancy figures will most likely replace its mattresses every four to five years. For one lower down the star-class ladder, with a management looking to squeeze every angle to save money, the answer might be closer to ten. Some hotels are known to extend this even beyond. There is really no way for hotel guests to tell the age of their bedroom mattress. However, as the mattress nears its double-digit birthday, even the best mattress, despite undergoing a rigidly enforced maintenance policy that sees it flipped, rotated and cleaned at least twice a year will develop dips and bumps. After serving as makeshift trampolines and work bed, as well as supporting thousands of slumbering guests, even a hotel's beds have a departure time. And that’s when guests don’t get to sleep the sleep of angels.
When the time comes to renew existing mattresses, disposing them can pose a huge challenge for hoteliers. Not only must they consider how to remove them from the property whilst bringing in the new mattresses (without disturbing guests), they must store the old ones somewhere and identify how to eventually get rid of them. Typically, hotel beds that reach the end of their service life are rounded up by an auctioneer who sells them by public auction mainly to other hotels with lower price points. The other option is that they end up in landfills. One can argue that selling used mattresses is a form of recycling although opinions may differ on guests continuing to sleep upon mattresses that are beyond reuse. The better brands of hotels shun this practice, citing “To sell used mattresses is not our model”. Several years ago, hotels frequently distributed partially used soap in guest rooms for staff use. Thankfully; this obnoxious practice has virtually disappeared. Selling broken and unusable mattresses to lower rated hotel operators is no different and is an unhealthy and non-sustainable approach.
Mattresses dumped in landfills occupy a lot of space and some can take as long as 80 years to decompose. Hence, the issue of what to do with the old and uncomfortable mattresses is going to be sooner or later, a huge problem. Mattresses and box springs are created from a number of materials, including wood, metal, fabric and plastic, which can all be recycled once they are separated. Unfortunately, there's no hotel or organisation in Sri Lanka that has a recycling program for mattresses. Time for some organisation to take an environmentally responsible initiative and position mattress recycling as an emerging opportunity within the recycling industry,
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka |
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