Buying mattresses online may be convenient but it's not good for the environment
Updated: May 21, 2020
The explosion in online mattress businesses has been one of the internet success stories of recent years. But what, on the face of it, seems a beneficial service offering convenient purchase of a bulky item, comes with lots of hidden costs. And not just the unnecessary expense of changing up our beds more frequently than is necessary for any normal person. Buying without first trying has created a rebound crisis for the environment. The facts speak for themselves...
Up to 20% returns rate, with the emissions impact of shipping something that size there and back again;
The fact that returns, even if only marginally used, are often just dumped, because mattresses are really hard to recycle;
On top of this, in the UK alone we are now chucking 7m old mattress a year as we are encouraged to change more frequently;
With only 19% of these recycled – the rest also go to landfill;
If the 600k mattresses Scotland alone throws away every year were stacked on top of each other this would be more than 100x taller than Ben Nevis