Mattress Recycling and Carbon Accounting: Turning Intuition into Insight

At Oakdene Hollins, we exist to tackle the world's most pressing environmental challenges. We champion the circular economy as a critical solution to the climate and biodiversity crises. And we believe carbon accounting is an essential tool to support decarbonisation—helping to show us the best path forward and backing decisions with robust, evidence-based data.

We're most at home at the intersection of circularity and carbon—and that's why our work with The Furniture Recycling Group (TFRG) stands out as one of our favourite projects to date.

According to the 2022 National Bed Federation's End-of-Life Report, 7 million mattresses are discarded in the UK every year, with an estimated "real recycling" rate of only 14%. 

These figures are striking—and for Nick Oettinger, Founder and Managing Director of TFRG, simply unacceptable.

Today, TFR Group recycles approximately 12,000 mattresses every week, diverting thousands of tonnes of valuable materials from landfills and back into the economy. While Nick had a strong intuition that reusing a mattress would be significantly better for the environment, especially in terms of carbon footprint, the questions remained:

  • How much better is reuse compared to other end-of-life options?

  • What is the carbon impact of dismantling and recycling through the TFRG’s process vs shredding a mattress, sending foam and textiles for energy recovery and recycling steel?

  • Is landfill the worst option? How much worse?

There were hunches, assumptions, and industry norms—but no clear data to back long-term decisions. And as we all know, industries shouldn't base major investments on best guesses. Plus TFRG wanted to back its sustainability claims with objective data.

That's where we came in. TFRG commissioned Oakdene Hollins to assess the carbon footprint of different end-of-life (EoL) mattress options, and we were thrilled. This is precisely the kind of work that drives us: supporting businesses to make smart, sustainable decisions backed by evidence of tangible benefits for the planet.

What did we find?

1. Reuse wins by far. After thorough sanitisation, reusing a mattress has the lowest carbon footprint of all the options analysed. In this case, intuition was spot on.

2. Not all recycling is equal.

Recycling a mattress through TFRG's dismantling process produces a carbon footprint almost three times lower than recycling via shredding (where steel is recovered, but foam and textiles are sent to energy recovery). We expected a difference—but the scale of the gap was eye-opening.

3. The surprise: landfill vs shredding.

One of the most surprising findings was that landfilling a whole mattress actually results in a lower carbon footprint than shredding it, recycling steel and sending non-metal components to energy-from-waste. Specifically, the carbon footprint of shredding is three times higher than landfill's. It makes sense when you consider that this recycling route involves energy recovery through incineration, which is a carbon-intensive process. Even so, the prevailing assumption within the industry had been that landfill was the worst end-of-life option.

Of course, greenhouse gas emissions are only part of the environmental picture—landfills bring other significant issues, such as land use and long-term pollution. However, from a carbon footprint perspective, this insight challenges a commonly held assumption and invites the industry to think differently.

4. The carbon culprit in shredding: foam and plastics.

The most significant contributor to carbon emissions in the shredding route comes from sending polyurethane foam and fabrics to energy recovery. This finding sparks a new question: What if those materials were recycled instead—for example, into building products? Could we drastically reduce the footprint of these recycling routes?

This project had everything we love:

✔ A confirmation of smart intuition

✔ A surprising result that challenges industry assumptions

✔ New questions to explore

✔ Clear, actionable data to support decisions—at the company, industry, and policy level

We're proud of our role in helping to shape the future of mattress recycling, and we're grateful to TFRG for trusting us.


If your business is navigating the intersection of circularity and carbon, we're here to help you do it right—with rigour, passion, and a focus on impact.

Oakdene HollinsComment