EDITORIAL

Dreaming of a solution to unwanted mattresses

Posted 7/30/15

What happened behind Sandy Lane Meat Market in the last three weeks has become a problem at just about every clothing collection bin in the city. While designed and labeled for clothing and shoes, …

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EDITORIAL

Dreaming of a solution to unwanted mattresses

Posted

What happened behind Sandy Lane Meat Market in the last three weeks has become a problem at just about every clothing collection bin in the city. While designed and labeled for clothing and shoes, the bins have become disposal sites for just about every conceivable item from furniture to toys, books, housewares, carpeting, appliances and even toilets.

From one perspective it makes sense. If the agency or company is collecting clothes to recycle, couldn’t they also make use of other items and isn’t that preferable to throwing them out?

That’s not the way Donald Mariani, owner of Recycling Association Inc. that owns the bin behind Sandy Lane Meat Market, sees it. Mariani, who started his business in 2006, collects about six million pounds of clothing annually from bins in this state and Massachusetts. In recent years, he said, collections have increased 200 percent.

This is not a surge in people cleaning out their closets and dressers, but rather using bin locations as “dumps” for things they don’t want. Mariani pays to have much of what is dumped hauled away.

A used mattress is an item few want and many mattresses end up alongside clothes bins. In this case, clearly the bin location is being used as a dump. Mattresses don’t only end up alongside bins, but also behind vacant buildings, in empty lots and alongside wooded roads throughout the city.

While it doesn’t make it right, it’s understandable. It’s a matter of money and convenience.

The city does not pick up mattresses as it will for furniture, appliances and TVs with a call to the sanitation division. The option is to bring the mattress and box springs to the landfill, RI Resource Recovery, and pay $15. Responsible people do that. Others apparently get as far as a clothing bin and no further.

As for the city, the fee to dispose of mattresses as part of “heavy” or weekly scheduled sanitation collections is $50 a mattress.

There is an alternative and one we think the city should consider.

Resource Recovery also has a flat $250-per-ton rate for mattresses. Many communities have established mattress centers where people can leave their mattresses for free or a fee. They are then transported to Resource Recovery, where they are recycled.

Further, establishing a mattress recycling center now would prepare the city for what is planned next spring, when mattress manufacturers assume the cost of recycling. When that happens, there will be no cost to recycling and, hopefully, people will be accustomed to responsibly dispose of an item that has become a community nightmare.

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