Over the course of one year, Eugene recycled enough mattresses to stack 10 Mount Hoods on top of one another. Laid end to end lengthwise, they could stretch from Eugene to Medford. St. Vincent de Paul processes 250 mattresses each day, harvesting recycled materials to send to a variety of industries. Employees wear clear safety glasses and neon T-shirts, ripping apart the worn out goods and organizing wooden frames in one pile and metal springs in another.
When the program first began, SVdP’s Executive Director Bethany Cartledge drove out to the landfill to count discarded mattresses herself, assessing Eugene’s need for the program. “Landfill workers were really shocked that they were seeing hundreds of mattresses every day,” Cartledge said. “Now, these landfills in particular are really happy to see them go away.”…