A mountain of used mattresses had accumulated for more than fifteen years in one of the areas of the Fabricio Valverde Environmental Park, located in Puerto Ayora, Galapagos. The inhabitants of the island, not knowing what to do with this waste, left it lying in corners, parks, vacant lots, and municipal cleaning personnel collected it and took it to said park. This waste remained there waiting for an environmental manager to recycle it or, in turn, to decompose.
Currently there is no longer a battery as such and most of the mattresses have been disassembled and their components separated. Sponges and textile fibers have been compacted in presses to create bales. In each bale there are between 20 and 25 mattresses. In another area are the metal supports that have this waste inside.
PET bottles collected in the Galapagos will be turned into clothing
These components will be transferred to Guayaquil so that the company Geocycle can carry out the co-processing of this waste. The company shreds components, such as sponges and textiles, which are then used to make fuel for cement kilns. Meanwhile, the springs are used to create steel again and use it in other processes. This procedure is given thanks to an agreement signed between the Municipality of Santa Cruz and the Chaide company.
Henry Bayas, spokesman for the Environmental Department of the council, says that the problem of managing used mattresses was complex on the island and when the current municipal administration arrived, close to 1,000 were registered and there was no environmental manager to take charge of these. waste.
“This is a problem of more than fifteen years. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the residents of Santa Cruz deliver the mattresses to the sidewalk, leave them on land, and the collection truck takes them to the waste classification center, but they were left there. Now we will finally get them off the island. At the moment the collection of mattresses has no cost“, He says.
Chaide also hired the staff who take apart the mattresses and compact them. “This has helped us speed up the process,” adds Bayas. In fact, when reducing the mountain of mattresses, the staff of the environmental park detected that the base of the pile was made of tires that were covered by the mattresses. Before this discovery Galapagos had been declared free of used tires. The council is already managing the co-processing of these tires.
Raúl Estévez, Chaide’s Sales and Innovation Manager, affirms that they chose Santa Cruz for this initiative because the island already had a differentiated collection system and, in addition, because of the fragile ecosystems that were affected by the non-treatment of this waste. .
“A mattress takes between 80 and 100 years to degrade and that is why proper disposal is necessary. What we want is to act on the mattresses that are contaminating the island. We have committed to the delivery of resources, scrapping the mattresses to facilitate their transfer to the continent”, indicates.
More than 16,000 used tires from the Galapagos have been recycled in four years
The executive affirms that this initiative will allow them to continue helping Santa Cruz in the future in the treatment of this waste, since now they have fine-tuned logistics issues. It would only be to define the frequency of removal of used mattresses.
“For us it is a long-term project, but there is still no defined second stage, but that will be done in the coming years“, He says. Estévez clarifies that the components of used mattresses cannot be reused to make new ones and that is why their co-processing must be sought in other production chains.
For Christian Armas, manager of the Silberstein hotel, located in Puerto Ayora, the mattress initiative is positive and he considers it a great help for the hotel sector. He indicates that before they hired a truck to take the about 40 mattresses that the hotel normally discards from time to time and deposited them in the “dump” or gave a certain part to animal foundations that needed them.
“Let’s imagine that in a house you have an average of three mattresses and their arrangement is already complicated, but we have close to 40, where was that garbage? That is why it is positive that there is the reuse of these parts”, he points out.
This is the first time that a large-scale “mattress cleaning” has been carried out in a province of the country. However, in Quito and Guayaquil, Chaide also has a project so that people can properly dispose of their used mattresses.
If users are not Chaide customers and want their mattress removed, they must pay $25, regardless of its size or brand. If it’s a customer, you get $25 off your new mattress if you turn in your old one.
In Ecuador there are about 14 million mattresses in the market that are being used and each year one million of these new items are sold.
“In Ecuador there are 14 million mattresses that at some point must be discarded and if they are not treated like planet Chaide they will end up contaminating. So we are trying to reach other cities to prevent mattresses from ending up in dumps, rivers and streams”, affirms Estevez.
Currently between Guayaquil and Quito, Chaide is processing about 70 used mattresses per month, these have the same destination as those collected in the Galapagos. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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