A Healthy Home | Healthy & Sustainable Mattresses

This topic is a new one for me. When the team and I dug into our research on sustainability I never imagined that we’d be talking about mattresses! But as any good student would do, every time we had an item to source for a client, we asked ourselves, is this sustainable? Is it harmful to our health? And so we asked all the questions and did a little research.

Now, I am a BIG fan of memory foam mattresses. I personally have a Tempurpedic at home and an endy at the cottage and we are obsessed. So much so that no hotel bed is ever as comfortable. 

But of course when I started to learn about the foam in sofas I wondered about the foam in the mattress. I do not have any substantiated research to say that they are bad but I will say that some mattresses may have Chemical Off-Gassing when they are first unwrapped. 

Flame retardants, formaldehyde, and benzene have been found in some mattresses and can be linked to health issues such as cancer, infertility, and developmental brain disorders. If your mattress is off-gassing harmful chemicals, you're breathing in those toxins for hours every night.

Eventually this off-gassing will stop. This is true of regular mattress and memory foam. 

I highly recommend that you look for a mattress that is made in Canada or the USA. Endy, Purple and Bloom are all made in North American and so have a smaller carbon footprint than others. Plus it's always a bonus to support North American jobs.

In our research we discovered Organic Mattresses. I am intrigued by this, though I have yet to try one or use one in a client project. 

Organic mattresses contain natural materials that smolder instead of ignite, which means they are made without toxic flame retardant chemicals. And organic mattresses don't off-gas harmful chemicals that can impact your health.

Organic cotton and wool are the most common sources of padding and fabric for these mattress that are usually made with latex rubber foam instead of the traditional petroleum based foams.

There are several companies that offer organic mattresses. Hastens is a popular high end mattress company out of  Sweden. Hastens uses only what they consider to be the finest natural materials. Sustainably produced and ethically sourced – so that those materials can be given a new life one day.

I like their slogan “A product that comes from nature wants to return to nature and that’s how it should be.” The foundation of their mattress is horse hair and they are the highest price point I have ever seen for a mattress. 

Another company we found while researching was Dormio Organic Beds. They are Canadian and use natural organic latex, Organic Wool & Organic cotton in all of their mattresses. For more info you can check them out here.

Have you had an experience with a mattress off-gassing or do you own an organic bed? I’d be curious to know your thoughts. One thing I do know is that organic is far more expensive than non-organic!