Mechanical recycling of foam from end-of-life mattresses by AIR-LAY process for the production of new mattresses with a fully circular approach

A novel method for the recycling of end-of-life mattresses foam, using an AIR-LAY process which employs a bi-component fiber as a binder for the polyurethane foam, have been developed and optimized. This method permits to obtain materials with the same density of the starting foam (25 kg/m³) and with a significantly lower density with respect to that obtainable with the rebonding process (above 70 kg/m³) that uses isocyanates to bond the foam particles. The obtained recycled foams have been tested by mechanical compression and recovery tests showing that compression values of 3.7 KPa, similar to that of the mattress foam (3.0 KPa), can be achieved using 20 % of bi-component fibers as binders and a density of 35 kg/m³. On the contrary, only 3 times stiffer and denser materials can be obtained using the rebonding technology, thus making them not suitable for application in mattresses. On the basis of the results of the optimization tests a set of mattresses containing a layer of the recycled foams have been prepared. The results of the tests on the prepared mattresses have shown that they have the same compression behavior, recovery time and durability (after 30,000 cycles of compression) of a standard mattress without the recycled layer, thus proving that a fully circular approach in the recycling of the foam of the mattresses is possible using the AIR-LAY process.