 Did you know that over 80% of all mattresses created end up in the landfill or dumped in the environment? Today I'm at a place that has a solution for all of this mess. Most of this stuff all across the nation goes to the landfill. But today I'm at Seven Rivers Recycling in La Crosse, Wisconsin where they are repurposing what others normally throw away to keep it out of the landfill and to put it to good use. They are able to recycle about 90% of the mattress and that last 10% is actually turned into electricity to power homes and businesses. To date they have recycled over 85,000 mattresses. If you stacked those on top of each other that would be over 60 Empire State buildings and they are just getting started. Inside of this mattress is all usable materials. The steel is recycled and turned into things like appliances. The wood is chipped for using as a biofuel or as compost. The felt is used for movers blankets and for landscaping fabric and the foam is recycled into things like carpet backing and dog beds. Of course the solution is to take care of our mattresses and to use them for as long as we can and to design our stuff with natural biodegradable materials that have full circle life cycles. But if we do need to recycle our mattresses, Seven Rivers Recycling is proof that we do not need to fill up our earth with trash and that we can actually do business practicing the triple bottom line, people, planet and profit while regenerating our earth.