The Deadline for the Discarded Dreams Competition has been Extended!

Thankfully for those of us who like to wait until the last minute, the deadline to submit your designs for reclaiming old mattresses has been extended to December 19th! The Discarded Dreams Design Competition will be accepting submissions until midnight on the 19th and for those who didn’t get a chance to sign up, there is still time to register! The guidelines remain the same and preference will be given to designs that reuse as much of a mattress as possible with little or no virgin materials.

Winners will receive $1,000 and have the chance to develop their design into an actual product.

Visit the Discarded Dreams Website for guidelines, faqs, inspiration and to review other entries.

You can also view our original blog post on the competition here

Save the Mattress! The Discarded Dreams Design Competition

Ever think of where old and used mattresses end up? Most (40 million or so) end up in landfills each year. A new design competition called Discarded Dreams is challenging designers to turn old mattresses into a completely new recycled product. The competition is looking for students or professionals to create a comprehensive plan to reclaim the old mattresses and transform them into usable goods.

Architecture for Humanity and Rubicon National Social Innovations have created the contest to explore innovative ways of utilizing mattress waste. Preference will be given to teams who use the most material per mattress and entries are encouraged to take full advantage of local resources, and existing manufacturing and waste facilities.

Winners will receive $1,000 and have the chance to develop their design into an actual product.

To find out more about the competition check out the Open Architecture Network here.

How to Lay Some Misconceptions About Mattress Recycling to Rest in 1 1/2 Minutes

With increasing concern over our throw-away culture, many have asked what happens to those old mattresses seen left on the street, and if there is any way to keep them from being landfilled or incinerated with toxic consequences.   According to Greg Conigliaro, founder of Conigliaro Industries, a versatile recycling company in Framingham, Massachusetts, a mattress is one of the most difficult products to recycle due to its complex multi-material structure.  In spite of this, in 2002, the company became the first commercial mattress recycler in the country, and won a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection for their solution.  The minute-and-a-half process involves feeding a mattress through a large-scale “shredder”, which breaks it apart and allows it to be magnetically separated into its individual parts, (foam, cotton, wood, and steel) for resale as raw materials.  Conigliaro’s website claims that they annually process over 3000 tons of such material, “enough mattresses to fill 900 tractor trailers.”

(Image courtesy of Conigliaro Industries)

Please visit Conigliaro Industries for more information.