Melbourne company develops 100% plastic bed amid landfill problem

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Every year thousands of unwanted bedframes are sent into landfill, adding to an already significant environmental problem. Now a Melbourne company has developed a bed base made entirely of recycled plastic that could change the way the world sleeps.

Transcript

00:00Built like Lego.

00:05Takes about one hour to make a king single.

00:07And held aloft as an Australian first and possible global game changer.

00:11It may even be a world first.

00:13It's a fantastic circular economy solution.

00:16Australia has a plastic and hard waste problem, including beds.

00:21We throw away around 1.8 million mattresses every year in Australia and hundreds of thousands

00:26of bed frames.

00:27But this could change that.

00:29These shapes are moulded from 100% recycled plastic that would otherwise have gone to

00:34landfill.

00:35Tarpaulins to buckets to bread crates and milk crates are really common in society and

00:41therefore a common waste problem for society.

00:44But we can also use soft plastics, LDPE.

00:48The beds, created with seed funding from Sustainability Victoria, have also been trialled at a remote

00:53Northern Territory community, Melbourne Student Accommodation and with Melbourne's Storm

00:57Academy players.

00:59Testers have found they're as durable as regular bases, with some advantages.

01:03I think it's really good.

01:04It's just completely noise-free.

01:05So there's no creaking, there's nothing like that.

01:09And rigorous testing is showing that this bed frame supports at least 140 kilograms

01:13of weight and anything else a regular bed is meant to take too.

01:17The beds should last 10 years and after a decade they can be recycled again and remade

01:22as new bases.

01:24It means the life cycle of this plastic and the useful life cycle of this plastic can

01:28be generations long.

01:30The bases are now being sold commercially and should cost the same as current bed bases.

01:34And the investors say if successful, they could venture into other kinds of sustainable

01:38furniture too.

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