Kickstart: Time to dream up some recycling ideas

With the weekend in sight, I'd like to announce that I am pro-nap, especially on a lazy Sunday afternoon when I should be doing laundry. Which leads me to bring up mattresses and a growing issue with the need to recycle used mattresses.

California's Bye Bye Mattress program recently reported it has now recycled more than 5 million mattresses since 2016. That's enough to span nearly 6,000 miles, or the length of a bridge from California to Hawaii and back, according to the Mattress Recycling Council.

It also adds up to 26.3 million pounds of polyurethane foam that was recycled through the program.

The number of mattresses coming in for recycling is adding up. Think of all those "bed in a box" home delivery mattresses, and consider what people are doing with their old mattresses. So MRC has created a $1 million research fund to find new things to do with all that used foam and other materials.

"The number of used mattresses dismantled by MRC recyclers and the amount of steel, foam and other materials reclaimed is steadily growing each year. To sustain future growth, it is vital that we help identify new economically viable uses for those materials," MRC President Ryan Trainer said.

DuPont Co. reclaimed its independence in 2019 after a brief merger with Dow. Now its former CEO is back at that post.

Frank Esposito wrote about the shakeup at the top of the Wilmington, Del., chemical company that saw the return of Ed Breen.

Breen first joined DuPont in 2015, leading into its merger into DowDuPont Inc. Now he's been brought in to "move aggressively to secure our foundation for growth."

Bloomberg has been following the efforts of the NextGen Cup Challenge, which is looking for a better alternative to single-use cups at fast-food chains such as McDonald's and Starbucks.

The issue is that restaurants use millions of foodservice cups each year, and there are issues that make it hard to recycle them for almost every version out there. And because they're takeout cups, it's hard to just replace single-use with something like a ceramic alternative.

Now two Northern California communities are about to try out an alternative that would replace single-use cups with plastic cups fitted with an RFID tags. Users can get a cup at one participating location and drop it off at another. An off-site coordinator collects, cleans and then redistributes the cups for further use.

The material of choice for the cups? Recyclable plastic. One group involved in the program noted that people didn't like the experience of drinking out of reusable metal cups, so the company settled on recyclable white plastic.

"Consumers need a product that isn't going to be so much of a step change," she said.