Published in Sydney Morning Herald | November 7 2021 | By Harriet Alexander

Joe Rasmussen has never had the urge to throw himself from the top of the stairs of his Smithfield warehouse onto the piles of mattresses that cover the floor.

“They’ve been people’s beds for 10 or 15 years, and then they’ve been in this fairly dusty environment, so they’re pretty disgusting,” he said

“It’s not a glamorous industry.

Not a glamorous one, but perhaps a virtuous one. Mr Rasmussen is the NSW State Manager for Soft Landing, which handles around half the market share of the mattress recycling business in Australia.

Mattresses are one of the greediest waste items in terms of the landfill space that they occupy. Their high volume to weight ratio makes them expensive to move and, once buried, their low density compromises the civil engineering of the landfill…

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