Buying a mattress is one of those onerous tasks that can be costly, time consuming and confusing with the incredible amount of options out there. Further, what do you do with your old mattress once it’s done? Will my new mattress be safe for my health and the environment? Fortunately, there are folks out there like our guest, Joe Alexander, General manager of Keetsa Mattress, who have the answers and the product to satisfy your need to rest clean, green, and easy.

JA: My name is Joe Alexander, Keetsa Mattress.

GA: Title?

JA: General Manager of Keetsa Mattress.

GA: So this is a new store.  Right?   I mean, you just moved in here.

JA: Just moved in a few months ago.

GA: How’s it been going? People been treating you right? Is this the right demo?

JA: You know, I get the “demo question” from a lot of advertisers a lot. “What’s your demographic?” You know, anybody with a brain who has a mattress, everybody needs to sleep somewhere and we’ve got something that hits people for their price point, we’ve got people who are concerned about their health, we’ve got people who are just, “I need a bed right now, this moment! We’ve got almost every niche covered with this product.

GA: So you can actually have access to this product and not have to be a millionaire.

JA: Well that’s (been) my catch phrase from day one.  You don’t have to spend a lot of green to go green. We’ve attracted a nice little bevy of celebrities. The other day I sold to Roger Craig, former 49er and Calvin Klein model. Roger Craig saw our commercial on TV in San Jose and called my store and said, “I’m looking for that guy on TV.” And so I’m like, “Yeah right, it’s Roger Craig,” and he went and bought a bed and now he wants to tell everyone about it, he wants to come on the TV show. Craig (Newmark) from Craigslist, Jaime (Hyneman) from Mythbusters, Jerry Brown the (former) Governor of California, Matt Cain the pitcher from the San Fancisco Giants. Here we’ve had TV Caprio, she’s one of the lead actresses from “Across the Universe,” she’s gonna be in the next Spiderman musical, and George C. Scott’s son. You’re right, you don’t have to come in and spend five grand to get something that’s good and comfortable and good for the environment and good for your health. We were doing another radio interview the other day and it’s funny how a lot of people, just because it has the green label will buy something without going out and doing any research so hopefully part of this job is not only providing people with good mattresses but educating people on whether you buy our product or not, this is what you should be looking for and this is what really constitutes “green” or “organic” mattress.”

GA: Let’s talk about your industry, on the whole, I mean, mattresses are products that get used and then discarded. What’s the life cycle of a typical mattress.

JA: You know what, when you say “typical mattress,” that encompasses Sealy, Serta, Simmons. Those are the top-selling brands in the world. And those beds, the lifecycle on those beds, is very short. The reason why is because those companies are all publicly held, so they’ve got to show a high profit margin to their investors. So there’s a lot of hands in there, a lot of money already up front and by the time it comes to you, they’ve got to sell it at a reasonable price. So the only place they have to cut, is the quality of the material and we see those customers on a daily basis. “I’ve had my bed two, three, four, five years and it’s already got a big body impression.” It’s because the quality of the foam is a very low, cheap quality of foam. The springs don’t give out, that’s not why it’s got a big body impression, it’s the foam that compresses very quickly. It’s a 1.2-1.8 density foam and it’s not designed to last very long. People go out and buy it because (they) recognize the name and they come in and go, “Gosh, I’ve had my bed just a few years and it’s already got a body impression.” So a typical Keetsa will last you about 12-15 years. We warranty it for 20. I never really encourage anyone to keep it that long. As long as you keep it covered nicely in a breathable space it should last you a good 12-15 years.

GA: How much of it is foam and how much of it is other stuff?

JA: Well, like your bed isn’t all memory foam. A lot of people think, “Oh, that’s all memory foam.” If it was all memory foam, it would be this big gooey mess. There’s everything up from 5 (inches) to down to an inch and that’s really where the difference in the pricing is. With our cheap model, we don’t go, “Oh, we’re gonna cut back on the quality of the spring or the quality of the foam.” From the top to the bottom, it’s the same density, it’s the same coils, the same materials.  As you go up in price, it’s just more foam.

GA: So, I want to talk to you about Keetsa’s manufacture and supply chain.

JA: Yeah that’s a really important aspect. Another thing I was explaining just the other day, you know, “green” doesn’t just mean you throw an organic cover on your mattress and now you’re a green company. We’ve addressed it from the manufacturing, from the shipping, from the distribution, to getting it to the customer’s home, to the product itself, and to ultimately, the demise of the product. Most of that supply chain that I was just talking about of the typical mattress company is they’ve got factories set up around the United States, little regional factories, and they will buy their springs from Leggett and Platt and Leggett and Platt has a factory and they make the springs and they truck it to the manufacturer and they truck the fabric and DOW chemical trucks the chemicals and the foam companies truck everything. So all this stuff is trucked to this central location. Then it’s manufactured. Then it’s packaged and it’s trucked to these companies warehouse like Mattress Firm or Sleepy’s and stuff like that and it’s trucked to their warehouse. You buy it in their Sleepy’s store and you buy it and they put it on a truck and take it to your house. It’s a tremendous amount of carbon footprint and gas. Now we manufacturer overseas. It’s all done in one location. We source everything from inside our own company in China. It’s in the “fair trade zone,” it’s not a Chinese-owned company, and it’s a Green America certified company. So everything’s sourced in that one place. It’s put on a tanker, it’s put on a barge with millions, and I tell people all the time, with millions of iPods and iPads, because if anybody wants to talk smack about it, if they’re carrying around an iPod or an iPad…

GA: Yeah, I don’t have an argument against setting up shop in China…

JA: Well as long as they do so responsibly.

GA: It can be mutually beneficial.

JA: Well, we got more of an argument about it before the economy tanked. Then, when people started being more cost-conscious those arguments dried up real quick. I’m very conscious about that because I’m a consumer as well. There’s a lot of unregulated junk that comes out of China like the lead that was found in drywall several years ago and things like that but there are, in the 80s, foreign trade zones that were set up and the factory that we ship from is in one of those foreign trade zones so it’s not really regulated by the Chinese government. But everything’s shipped over with millions and millions of other products, lands in our warehouse in LA and you come in and you buy it and you either take it from here, it’s UPS’d here, or we UPS it straight from the factory to your house. So the amount of carbon footprint, coming farther distances, is actually smaller than ones made domestically.

GA: So the foam itself is made of what.

JA: The foam itself is just like a synthetic, and this is one of the things that I go into with people as well, there are two types of foam in the world: there’s latex foam and there’s memory foam, that’s it. A lot of people will go, “Well I’ve got a regular bed. What’s the difference between a regular bed and memory foam?” Well, if you have a regular bed, it’s memory foam. They might call it convoluted foam or high-density foam or something – it’s memory foam. Memory foam is a synthetic-based foam. Now, within those two sub-categories you’ve got, Simmons has a latex mixed with about 50% synthetic, 50% latex.

GA: Which is a petroleum product.

JA: Exactly. Then you’ve got companies like Tempurpedic which is 100% petroleum. But then you have people like our who do 80% synthetic, 20% plant oil. It’s a caster bean oil and what that does, obviously, it lessens the dependency. There’s another step, though, that’s important in that it goes, the foam itself goes through a three week process that accelerates the “off gassing” so by the time you open up that bed at home there are no detected VOCs, there are no detected harmful VOCs. A VOC, obviously, is a scent. You smell a rose, that’s a VOC. Everything has a VOC to it.

GA: Petroleum products often have…

JA: Oh, well they have a toxic VOC. Theres toluene, there’s formaldehyde, there’s a whole host of…

GA: I remember when I first got my mattress from your petroleum-based competitor before I knew better that it reeked!

JA: Oh, of course it did! I remember when I used to sell it I had customers coming in with bloody noses, eyes all beet red. Well, there’s toluene, all those chemicals are going into your blood stream, going into your brain, you know, your body doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s probably not a bad thing that your body is sensitive to chemicals so you know what you’re dealing with but it’s not good for anybody. Just like when you paint your house with new paint and it smells like that for a while and it goes away, there’s a finite amount of material in there that will “off gas.” It’s not like it’s an infinite supply of chemicals that’s coming out. And that’s what happens with this product. Thought the curing process, we accelerate that so you have the benefit of the memory foam without the toxicity normally associated with memory foam. So that’s an important distinguisher between our products. We’re currently working on getting a Greenguard certification, we’ll be one of the only foam mattress companies in the world that have that. What we want to focus on right now, if you go to Keetsa.com, you can download our VOC report. We have a third-party VOC report that shows all the things normally associated with memory foam. The other aspect of that, as well, is the fire barrier. Basically if you go into any of the mattress stores around here and ask, “What do you use for your fire barrier?” They’re going to tell you it’s a “proprietary blend.” Okay, well that’s tantamount to going to the grocery store, pulling down a box of cereal and where it says “Ingredients” it says, “Trust us, it’s good for you.” I guarantee you in this age of “eco” and “green” and “organic,” if there was one thing that was good in that fire barrier they would have banners throughout the store trumpeting that information. The fact is, they buy it from DOW Chemical and it’s not good and most of the major brands use it because it’s cheap. What we’ve done is taken the time to engineer something that’s non-toxic to make the beds fire retardant.

GA: This is the outer layer of the mattress?

JA: What companies do is they treat the fabric and they wrap the foam in the fabric and that fabric is beneath all the other fabrics. And that’s just to provide (protection) that if there was a heat source, it wouldn’t catch the petroleum-based foam on fire. Latex? Latex uses wool. To make synthetic foam fireproof with wool you’d have to have a hugh-freakin-mongous stack of wool on top of it and it’s just not practical. So we use stuff like glycerol which is a sugar, phosphate salts which is a food additive to make the bed fire retardant. The Federal Government doesn’t care what you use, you could use dead baby seal skin, it has to pass the test. So we took the time and the money and the research to find alternatives to the cheap DOW Chemical treatment. So those are the aspects of how the mattress, the foam is a more, when we say “eco friendly,” it’s better for your home’s environment and your overall health in that it’s not gonna subject your body to a lot of chemicals and it’s not going to fill the air in your house with a lot of chemicals. It’s not going to “off gas” in your house, basically.

GA: So, now I’m done with my Keetsa mattress, I’m ready to get rid of it or replace it. What do I do? Is there a company take-back?

JA: There are places throughout the United States, not very many at this point, but where we have stores set up in California there are a couple different recycling places. There’s one in Oakland that will take all the mattress that come through, a lot of the waste management companies will filter the mattresses that they pick up and several places that do pick up and take there and they also have bins there where you can take your mattress to the dump. They’ll filter them over to a company called DR3 and DR3 has people that’ll take them apart, shred a lot of the stuff, and then they have third party purchasers for all that material. Let’s say you live in Beutte, Montana and there’s no mattress recycler there. Now, the nice thing is that this will outlast most major brands by two or three times.

GA: Are these mattresses subject to things like bed bugs and dust mites?

JA: Any surface you can get bedbugs. If you’re in that surface you could get bedbugs in your couch, you could get bedbugs on a 100% latex mattress, you could get bedbugs in a sleeping bag. Bedbugs eat you. Insects just need food and water, that’s all they need. And dust mites just need organic material, skin cells and stuff that sloughs off of our body and your sweat for a food source. So you hear sometimes how latex is dust mite resistant. Well, latex itself might be but and insect is not gonna make the distinction of whether or not that dead skin cell is sitting on a latex mattress or a foam mattress. It’s gonna eat the dead skin cell.

GA: How about mold?

JA: I had a customer in San Francisco, they moved from back East, they had a 100% latex mattress, they had intended to get furniture for it, they set it on the ground and a couple months later they got a Keetsa, they got a bed frame, and they moved their (old) bed and there was all mold underneath. It’s because everybody’s body sweats. When our bodies go to sleep they shut down but actually it increases the metabolism because your body’s rebuilding and so we sweat. Gravity takes that moisture, pulls it down. That’s why beds need to be on a box spring or a platform, wood slats, to allow for air flow. Old houses, there’s mold already in the wood because they’re over 100 years old. Moisture and warmth and darkness – mold. So the whole bottom of their bed was moldy, the floor was all starting to raise up with mold and that was a latex (mattress). Latex itself may or may not but when materials are around that and get introduced to it…

GA: So we’re here in Soho in New York City where you can try out one of these beds. Where else can we find Keetsa?

JA: Well, we’ve got six stores in two countries. We’ve got five on the West coast, one here, one in Toronto… or four on the West coast, one here, and one in Toronto and we’ve got about 45 retailers throughout the United States as well, so a lot of major cities carry Keetsa.

Thanks for listening to Green Air, I’m Rich Awn.

Photo courtesy of Tomonaldo.

Living an eco-friendly existence doesn’t have to end when you do.

Ghoulish as it may sound, the business of burials is something we’re all fated to deal with eventually but new environmentally responsible options to handle this morbidly necessary event have emerged here in the US adding a note of green to this eerie realm of commerce.

Elizabeth Fournier, Director of Cornerstone Funeral Services and Cremation in Boring, Oregon, is the self-proclaimed “Green Reaper.”

A lot of people have chosen cremation already and a lot of that is the idea of, ‘Hey, I don’t want to take up space, I don’t want my family to shell out a bunch of cash, and I want to do something good for the environment.’ But of course, what we’re learning is the idea of cremating somebody isn’t so environmentally conscious as we once thought.  Actually burying somebody  the Green way with no chemicals, no concretes, and no metals in the soil is actually a better choice.

It’s the goal of Ms. Fournier and others in her industry to offer ways families can continue the responsible legacy of their deceased…beyond the grave.

For more on this and the full interview with Elizabeth Fornier, scythe through some of the following links:

Composting the dead (Environmental Graffiti)

Burials and cemeteries go green (NPR)

Do cemeteries impact on the environment? (University of Technology, Sydney)

Japan’s high tech graveyard solution as burial space grows scarce (Treehugger)

Artwork by amanda.f.i.

A new documentary uncovers the truly disastrous effects of the Swine Flu following the lives of a young Egyptian family living in Cairo’s ultra-poor recycling village.

Marina of the Zabbaleen, a new documentary by Torch Films, enters the lives of this largely Coptic Christian tribe seen through the eyes of three children and their mother.  Barely eking out survival in this poor community, Marina’s tribe subsists by collecting nearly half of Cairo’s municipal solid waste, separating it into its recyclable components and feeding what’s left to their pigs.

When the H1N1 virus, or Swine Flu, was declared an international pandemic, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ordered all the country’s 300,000 hogs slaughtered.  The result was an all out halt of Egypt’s decentralized, natural and sustainable waste disposal system – the hungry pigs.

Now, the garbage heaps in Cairo are too much for the Zabbaleen to control themselves, effectively burying the unfortunate tribe under the very material that kept them alive.

For a look at Marina of the Zabbaleen, click here.

Screenshots taken from Marina of the Zabbaleen courtesy of Torch Films.

Editor’s Note: The Green A-Team continues to expand like a hyper-adept extremophile over the turbulent digital seas with our newest addition, Shireen Qudosi.  Enjoy her delicious post!

As the saying has it, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”  Yet with a little bit of creative thought, you can turn your trash into your treasure.

That’s exactly what has inspired a new wave of sustainability that goes beyond practicality and into decadence.

The idea of artistic living is a growing trend in an eco-friendly culture, which has already witnessed a significant growth in consumer interest when it comes to modular living and organic decor.  Even non-greenies are getting interested now that being green has brought with it a new level of stylish eccentricity.

And what comes more easily in this economy than an assortment of empty wine bottles after you’ve just thrown a smashing get-together?  With the preference being on sourcing cheap entertaining ideas, most people now see staying at home with a good meal and great wine as a viable alternative to spending money on restaurants and clubs.

If your home is the newest place to be seen, then ice maker machines are indispensable for cocktails while compact wine refrigerators are an inexpensive alternative to costly built-in wine cellars.

Wine Bottle Ideas:

There are a number of ways to reuse wine bottles. Among the more common ideas are reusing them as water pitchers, votive vases, torches, and flower bed liners. However, there are dozens of other smart options that are rarely explored.

Wine Bottle Cheese Boards – What could be quainter than using a cheese board made out of wine at you next cocktail.  Apparently that’s exactly what Vineyard Designs thought when they started offering their custom recycled wine glass boards.

Water Feeders – On a very hot day or when you’re away, fill the bottles of water and stick them into the pot or soil near your plant.  The water will slowly percolate from the bottle and into the soil.

Wine Bottle Chandeliers – In addition to the popular row lighting and pendant lighting, Changedminer (pictured) put together an interesting chandelier with wine bottles strung around it.   It’s a unique sustainable element in your home and it catches the light beautifully during the day and especially at sunset.

Rewined Recycled Glassware – Get uniquely hued wine bottle glassware made from orphaned bottles left behind at local restaurants and bars.

Wine Bottle Building Blocks – Rather than just one element, your entire home or venue can serve as a creatively designed showcase – a testimony of your creativity and commitment to sustainability.

Wine bottles can be used to create an interesting mosaic-styled wall piece.  The most gorgeous of these displays is just outside of Montreal at a place called Bottle Houses, Prince Edward Island.

PEI is known for its lush landscapes and pastoral living, which makes the wine bottle homes stand out that much more, offering a mixture of ingenious modern design paired with an idyllic setting; and the combination works brilliantly.

This theme of bottle wall art has been running strong from coast to coast. Javier’s, an upscale restaurant in Crystal Cove, features bottle-inspired wall art as a key feature in their eclectic setting.

Using wine bottles as building blocks shows creativity and ingenuity that can be carried to stylishly eccentric levels when used in restaurants. Morimoto’s Japanese Restaurant in New York has an entire wall created out of bottles.  The result is a dazzling spectacle that has the potential to launch a restaurant.  An alternative design is found at the Boa Steakhouse in Hollywood, where rows of bottles are lined along a clear wall.

Wine bottles go beyond just building blocks and have also become integral parts of a building’s thermal dynamics, providing a unit that’s not only appealing to the eye, but also meets our duty to our environment.  But if you’re not a wine drinker, you can ask local pubs and restaurants for their bottles, who I’m sure will be more than happy to give you their rubbish to turn into your own treasures.  The same ideas can also be achieved with beer, liquor, Pellegrino or other glass water bottles.

For more on wine bottle upcycling, check out some of the following links:

Wine bottle recycling is low – but some bottles getting lighter (Dr. Vino)

A trial project that uses recycled wine bottles filled with water to regulate a building’s internal temperatures (Media-Newswire)

Sleep it off inside a wine cask (Green Upgrader)

Wine Ideas brought to you by Air & Water, Inc.

Photos by Keith Watson, graciella06, aarn!, *~Dharmainfrisco~*, West County Camera,  changedminder.