Posted on 08/21/2012 2:47:03 PM PDT by matt04
At a new, 14,500-square-foot facility in Bridgeport's South End, three men spend their weekdays deconstructing old mattresses to be recycled.
"I enjoy myself," said 44-year-old Angel Morales, who walks from his house a few blocks away to arrive at the plant at 5:30 each weekday morning. (Since there's no air-conditioning, the employees like to finish their day early to avoid the worst of the heat.) "It kills time, and I'm doing something constructive," Morales said.
The facility is called Park City Green, and Morales is surrounded by hundreds of mattresses that are brought in by trucks each year. He can deconstruct about 50 a day using little more than a utility blade knife.
"It's like filleting a fish," said operations manager Bradford Mitchell as he watched Morales go to work on a mattress he had just hauled onto a spinning wooden worktable. "You basically put the mattress up here, you take a knife, you cut around it, and as you can see, he's just separating all the different materials."
Those materials -- wood, foam, rubber -- were tossed into new piles that rose up alongside the mattress stacks. They are later compressed by a baling machine, so they can be trucked out for resale.
Morales said his favorite part of working at Park City Green is the social environment -- working with his fellow employees. The plant also represents a second chance for some employees. The nonprofit Family Re-Entry, which helps people released from prison rebuild their lives, is helping the factory to find, train and counsel workers.
The work "is labor-intensive," said Adrienne Houel, CEO of The Green Team, a nonprofit in Bridgeport that runs Park City Green. "It gives us the opportunity to create more jobs."
(Excerpt) Read more at ctmirror.org ...
It’s productive work, and that in itself is honorable.
Do they kill the bed bugs?
“a new, 14,500-square-foot facility” to rip old mattresses up? The profit that this activity generates must be staggering.
I ripped up a few mattresses in my younger days,,wait,,,,,nm,,,
It is probably about as productive as many government jobs or government contracted jobs or government mandated jobs in monopoly utilities. There is no way the sale of baled up mattress components pays enough to cover the wages of the workers, let alone the administrators or the federal or state grant writers. It is a net drain on the economy.
They are charging 18 bucks a mattress to process.
But because the landfill only charges 2 bucks, they are trying to get a law passed to make each new mattress sold include the recycling cost.
I’m sure that they come across bed bugs, what are they doing with the materials? I don’t want to buy anything made from that old material.
Seems like a lot of things we buy or replace now have a recycling fee added on.
Thought about getting a new mattress earlier this year and absolutely cannot believe what they cost so decided the old one is just fine after all.
But less of one than paying these same people to sit on the couch all day smoking crack.
No, the bed bugs and lice hitch a ride back on his walk back to his house.
What an opportunity! I’ll bet there’s cash-money in them mattresses. ;)
“...they are trying to get a law passed to make each new mattress sold include the recycling cost.”
Typical ...liberal ...make work/play work project. If something can’t work without legislative intervention...its really probably not such a hot idea!!
I woke up after dreaming I had a dinner of mutton and my mattress was missing.
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