Designed internally by the Lancashire company’s engineers, the machinery dismantles and separates the components for pocket springs within mattresses, reducing the process from taking more than half a day per full pocket spring to two and a half minutes.
Pocket spring-based mattresses present specific challenges to recyclers because they consist of between 1,000 and 10,000 single springs, each wrapped inside a textile-based polypropylene pocket.
Traditionally, the only way of recycling them was to manually separate each spring from the pocket with a knife, which is time-consuming and commercially unviable.
Rather than being recycled, the pockets would have been either sent to the UK’s only scrap dealer that accepts pocket springs, at a large cost, where they are mixed into other scrap or, due to the excessive cost of scrapping the springs, sent to landfill.