Monstrous – but what lurks within?
Mighty monsters hiding under the bed are the stuff of nightmares but what about the mitey monsters thriving in your mattress?
Dust mites are proliferating and pooping in your mattress - no matter what make of mattress it might be and no matter how much you might have paid for it.
The facts are that mattresses deteriorate from day one - in support and in hygiene. As well as developing peaks and troughs (twisting you and your spine) and even the odd spring poking through (ouch), a used mattress harbours 100,000 to 10 million dust mites.
Dust mite faeces are a major contributor to asthma, eczema and other allergies.
The average person loses around half a pint (285 ml) of moisture into the mattress each night and sheds around a pound of skin (454 grams) a year – much of it into the mattress.
Bodily fluids and skin flakes mix with mites, dander and dirt making mattresses the ideal breeding ground for millions of mites, bacteria, and viruses.
Pretty dire thinking about what you're sharing your mattress with at home when sleeping on your own mattress, but absolutely dreadful when you're having to sleep on a used mattress in a hotel - not matter what star rating it might have.
It's enough to keep anyone awake at night - at home and away.
Deterioration and dirt alert, and why it is recommended that mattresses are changed every 7 years - a disaster for our health with monstrous consequences for our planet.
The US Mattress Recycling Centre records that 35-40 million new mattresses are sold annually in the United States, and at least 15 -20 million are discarded per year.
The National Bed Federation (NBF) estimates that over 8 million mattresses per year (22,000 per day) were discarded across the UK in 2018. Of those 8 million, 6.25 million ended up in landfill or were incinerated.
Since 2018, it is estimated that the UK annual mattress disposal figure has risen to over 10 million (28,000 per day). Laid side by side, that equates to a mattress highway of over 8,700 miles – from the UK to Brazil.
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No amount of recycling mattresses can resolve the systemic and structural problems with the take-make-waste linear bed/mattress industry.
“The circular economy calls for design innovation to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times…Design can empower cycles of reuse, repair, refurbishment, and recycling of technical materials... Circularity requires more features to be taken into consideration for the design of products, components, and materials, such as disassembly, upgradability, or recycled content.” – Ellen MacArthur Foundation
The Ammique® bed is a precision engineered and high performance sleep system that addresses all the problems with all mattresses.
Built to the highest specifications using select materials including over 90% reprocessed stock, Ammique beds are modular and adaptive in form and function.
With an estimated functional life of over 250 years, they can be cleaned and recleaned, safely used and reused, sold and resold, restyled and restyled repeatedly.
They need never be replaced or ever go to landfill.
Ammique Ltd is a UK based, vertically integrated company and circular business that takes a long-term view and full responsibility throughout the supply chain for the production, distribution and tracking of all its products. It is uniquely placed to transform the existing linear bed/mattress industry into a circular, sustainable mattress-free sleep and wellness industry - worldwide in collaboration with local partners serving communities.
Powered by love using design and systems thinking.
Email: sleep@ammique.com