It's not easy being green if you're a mattress manufacturer. The bulky items can't be made from all-sustainable resources, at least not at a reasonable price and at the quality level needed in the hospitality industry. So keeping them from a landfill is about the best thing for the environment.

“It's more challenging than with light bulbs,” says Ray Burger, president and founder of Pineapple Hospitality, and one of the industry's leading green advocates. “When someone says something is green, what shade of green is it? There's a wide variety of aspects that makes mattresses some level of green.”

The average mattress lasts seven years before finding a permanent home in a landfill. “It's really difficult to conceptualize how to make bedding green,” says Joe Miller, Sealy's director of global hospitality. Sealy's answer is making the product last longer. The new Posturepedic sleep systems with convertible pillowtops double the life of the mattress, leaving just the casing to replace.

Simmons has a similar offering with its EverNu mattress top, a zip-off covering, which doubles the life of the bedding and is made of recyclable polyester and polyurethane. “It's completely removable, reusable and recyclable,” says Steve Tipton, vice president of Simmons Hospitality. “It doesn't eliminate mattresses from going to landfill, but it slows it (from seven years to 14).”

Sleep Number by Select Comfort takes a different approach to the idea of green bedding with its modular mattresses that use an air chamber rather than steel coils. Instead of replacing the mattress, with Select Comfort, all the individual parts are replaceable, meaning the entire mattress isn't sent to a landfill. “I don't like to call us a green company,” says Larry Cronkhite, senior director OEM/Hospitality of Select Comfort. “We're eco-friendly. We are formaldehyde free and always have been.”

Denver Mattress uses steel coils made from recycled steel and its BioFlex Hybrid Foams replace petroleum-based material with product made from soybean oil. The company earlier this year started reusing the foam and mattress cover scrap left after getting cut in the quilted machine. The scrap is dumped into a shredding machine and eventually mixed with fiber and reused in the quilting. “There are a lot of different ways our industry is getting greener,” says Mark Koch, Denver Mattress' director of hospitality.