Reincarnating Saggy Landfill Bound Beds Into Unexpected Artistic Canvases

One third of our lives - approximately 8 hours each day -- is spent sprawled out in a horizontal position on a mattress where we snooze the nighttime away. Sooner or later, that basic staple in our lives is bound lose its supportive characteristics, sag in all the wrong places and literally become a pain in the back. That's the point in time when we embrace the "out with the old, in with the new" adage, but how can we do it in a way that is environmentally responsible? We're talking about a sizable amount of latex or polyurethane foam, wood, cotton fiber, metal coils and upholstery fabric, all of which could potentially end up in a landfill if you don't ask the right questions and make more of an effort to ensure that your has-been bed ends up in the right hands.

Due to thankfully stringent health regulations and increasingly thriving populations of bedbugs, donating your old mattress to local charities is definitely no longer an option. There are, however, national mattress recycling programs offered by Nine Lives Mattress Recycling, Coniglario Industries, the Northeast Minnesota Mattress Recycling Program and the St. Vincent de Paul Society that channel their efforts into reclaiming raw materials like coils into metal, wood into chips and textiles into clothing, leaving just 10% of each donated 23 cubic footer behind. While some new mattress manufacturers automatically pick up your old bed for recycling, if you are concerned about the legitimacy of their claims, ask them what company they use and refer to Earth911's recycling locator to go the extra mile for Mother Nature.  

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who fail to take the extra step to ensure that their old mattress will be reclaimed in an eco-friendly manner, instead choosing to covertly dump them in the middle of the night in alleys or on the side of parkways. Others wait for the day that their municipality removes bulky items, as was the case with the photograph below.

Resting on the curb of Los Angeles' Echo Park Avenue and Park Avenue, this mattress was converted into a guerrilla style street canvas by an anonymous artist. What a shame that the colorful piece ended up being collected via the city's Bureau of Sanitation instead of by a local patron of the arts since it is a somewhat original way to use an item that we traditionally think of as landfill material.

Interestingly, the old mattress-reincarnated-as-new-artwork is a trend that Canadian-based Brian Hunter is trailblazing with his diverse collection of reclaimed beds adorned with reclining figures.

Propped up around the perimeter of his property for all to see, his works demonstrate to mainstream thinkers that there is always a way to transform something undesirable into a thing of beauty. 

Do you think that this is a more constructive way to use dead mattresses (as opposed to breaking them down in a recycling facility)? Have you seen any other examples of artistic mattress recycling?