The soft furnishing recycling company said the pocket spring based mattresses present certain challenges to recyclers, consisting of between 1000 and 10,000 single springs each wrapped inside a textilebased polypropylene pocket, and their engineers created the machine to streamline the mattress recycling process and reduce the number of mattresses ending up in landfills. Traditionally, the only way of recycling pocket springs was said to be manual separation of each spring from the pocket with a knife, which is time consuming and expensive. 

Earlier, rather than being recycled the pockets would either be sent to the only scrap dealer in UK that accepts pocket springs at a high cost, or sent to landfill, said the company. The company cited a recent report which estimated that around 167,000 tonnes of mattresses were sent to landfill each year in the UK and approximately 5.9 million used mattresses were disposed of in 21014, with only 16 percent being recycled and 73 percent reaching the landfill, while the remaining 11 percent were incinerated. With TFR Group’s new patented automated pocket spring recycling machine, within just 2.5 minutes the components are automatically separated into steel and polypropylene waste streams, leaving recyclable components that have a value and can be sold on, re-used as scrap or recycled, the firm said.

“As far as we know, we are the first company in the world to design and create a machine to automate pocket spring recycling. Pocket springs are the most difficult components of mattresses to dismantle and recycle and there can be between 1,000 and 10,000 springs on each mattress so it was our priority to develop this piece of machinery,” noted Nick Oettinger, founder and managing director of TFR Group. “We are working with manufacturing partners to produce more versions of the machine that can be sold all over the world, speeding up pocket spring recycling for organisations in the UK and beyond, and ensuring we keep the materials away from landfill,” he said.