It started with a simple question from a mattress designer: “I want to make my mattress easier to recycle at the end of its use, but I don’t know what that means. Can the Mattress Recycling Council arrange a tour for me at a mattress recycling facility?”
Since 2021, those conversations no longer lead to one-off tours at a recycling plant. They’re conversations with momentum—and they’re happening during a popular workgroup that kicks off the International Sleep Products Association’s annual Sustainability Conference.
Now in its fifth year, MRC’s Industry Workgroup on Circular Design remains unique, bringing together players from the beginning to the end of a mattress’s value chain: suppliers, designers, manufacturers, and recyclers. But it’s not just unique for the sleep industry.
“This type of workgroup is really unusual,” agrees Ryan McMullan, principal consultant at sustainability consultancy Lean Green Way and workgroup facilitator. “We’re not aware of any other industry that has something like this, where every single stakeholder is able to sit down together at the same table and find real answers to the questions they have every day as they’re working to make their products more recyclable.”
‘There’s a real appetite for this in the industry’
Structured collaboration is important, especially as states are continuing to debate new mattress recycling legislation and packaging legislation, both of which will affect how mattresses are designed and sold. The idea of extended producer responsibility was first introduced in the United States in the 1990s and took off during the early 2000s. In 2026, a record nine states considered mattress EPR bills. ISPA is tracking 33 packaging EPR bills and 71 bills on other EPR product categories. While these counts include cross-filed companion and study bills, EPR legislative activity has grown sharply. According to the Product Stewardship Institute, 34 states now have 146 EPR laws across 20 product categories.
Of course, stakeholders in the sleep products industry have long been having open discussions within different parts of the value chain. That’s beneficial, but often the knowledge remains siloed. However, during MRC’s three-hour workgroup, everyone gets a seat at the table—literally. After a brief overview, attendees gather at various tables organized by topic. Each table has a facilitator, and the people there simply jump in, throw out a challenge or frustration they’re trying to solve, and discuss possible solutions.
Although competition and proprietary knowledge are very real, there are many questions on which the industry can easily collaborate. For example, how do we make a mattress more recyclable? What makes mattress foam unusable? How can we better use materials made from recycled content?
McMullan adds that each workgroup starts with a review of antitrust rules, and attorneys in the room will stop any conversation that does not comply with ISPA’s strict policy. “So, we give them a safe, neutral forum that’s monitored,” he says.
One topic that all manufacturers are grappling with is comfort returns—the popular retail policy that allows customers to try out a mattress and return it within 90 days, 180 days, or sometimes even up to a full year. “That lightly used mattress is still a used mattress; now, what does the manufacturer do with that?” says McMullan. “Especially when the trend in the industry is longer and longer comfort return periods.”
The collaboration and idea-sharing on this topic have been powerful, he recalls. Last year, Simba Sleep shared details on its “refurbished mattress” category. Much like certified pre-owned cars that are fully inspected, Simba’s refurbished mattresses are cleaned and sanitized to hospital standards, tested, inspected, and given new, authentic Simba parts replacements as needed.
“I could see when Simba was sharing its process, everybody in the room was scribbling furiously, because they’re all facing the exact same problem,” McMullan says. “It’s that churn of ideas that’s so exciting to see. There’s a real appetite for this in the industry.”
McMullan, who previously worked at Toyota, helped create the Workgroup for Circular Design to move the conversation upstream from recycling and to work to achieve source reduction. MRC’s workgroup was inspired by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Suppliers Partnership for the Environment, which brings together automotive suppliers and manufacturers.
The first iteration of the MRC workgroup in 2022 focused on adhesives and how to improve the recyclability of standard foam mattresses with adhesive-bonded latex, adhesive, and comfort foam. Out of that first discussion came several ideas, including mono-material adhesives, in which the adhesive is the same polymer as the foam. Four years later, “we now have several examples of mono-material mattresses on the showroom floor at ISPA EXPO,” says McMullan.
The original MRC workgroup then expanded from adhesives to include mattress manufacturers, other mattress components, recyclers, and designers. Kate Caddy, ISPA’s director of sustainability, brought in an international perspective by inviting global mattress recycling groups such as the Australian Bedding Stewardship Council and the European Bedding Industries’ Association.
It used to be that between the mattress designer and the recycler, there were four steps—assembly, distribution, retail, and consumer—and designers and recyclers rarely, if ever, met.
Thanks to the Industry Workgroup for Circular Design, that’s no longer the case. As more people see the value in sitting down together to hammer out real problems affecting everyone in the industry, the workgroup is growing. “You just start to see this magic happening with having the right people at the table who each know their domain and welcome the opportunity to figure out solutions,” says McMullan.
Often, one person from a company attends the workgroup, and the next year they bring two colleagues so each can join the discussion at three tables. “Maybe the first person is a product designer, but then the people they bring are a manufacturing manager and a sustainability manager,” says McMullan. “So, now we’re getting different expertise in the room from the same company, and the fact that there’s more that they want to discuss is a good thing. It tells us we’re offering something valuable.” •