Mattresses make their way to North Las Vegas for recycling

Truckfuls of old or unwanted mattresses make their way to North Las Vegas’ Mattress Paloma every day.

There, at 2257 W. Gowan Road, Suite 120, they meet Jesus Gonzalez, resident mattress destroyer at the first and only mattress recycler in Clark County.

Armed with a knife and a pair of barber’s shears, Gonzalez needs only about five minutes to dismember any size mattress put in front of him.

And with hundreds of mattresses pouring in every week from Sears, RC Willey and curbsides throughout the Las Vegas Valley, he almost always has a mattress in front of him.

“He can do between 20 and 30 mattresses a day,” explains Mattress Paloma owner Jesus Granados, “or else he’s training somebody else. We’re planning to have five or six destroyers working here one day. Pretty much by the middle of next year, we expect to have 12 to 13 employees just in recycling.

“We think (recycling) is going to be great for us because it will also feed into building mattresses. ... We have calls coming in already to expand both sides of the business.”

Granados built Mattress Paloma around a strong customer base fielded at North Las Vegas swap meets, where the company’s 47-year-old founder used to sell mattresses for $100 to $200 apiece.

The former truck driver from Chihuahua, Mexico, knew almost nothing about building mattresses before he started selling them in 2007. He just knew they were needed.

“Mattresses are the shoes of your sleep,” he said. “If the mattress isn’t for you, you need a new one. That’s why, when people get their taxes back, mattresses are the first thing they buy.”

Granados hatched the company’s plan to recycle disused and discarded mattresses more than a year ago but had to wait for the go-ahead from the Southern Nevada Health District before moving ahead with the effort in May.

Since then, business has been brisk. The company has even been in talks to take on mattresses discarded by casinos on the Strip.

Mattress Paloma’s efforts to divert those and thousands of other mattresses from Las Vegas’ landfills and deserts played a big part in Southern Nevada health authorities’ approval of the undertaking, according to engineering consultant Keith Brinkley, one of those who helped win the company’s recycling permit.

“The process with the health department can be torturous sometimes,” Brinkley said. “But certainly they recognize that the reality is these things are much better off recycled than left in the desert.”

Health officials’ main concern, he said, is bedbugs. That’s why materials turned around by Mattress Paloma are fully deloused even before they’re separated into sub-recyclable categories by destroyers such as Gonzalez.

From there, they’re on their way to help make another, more permanent kind of bed.

“Casket linings,” Brinkley said. “Once the foam’s shredded, it’s sent to California and sterilized, and that’s what they do with it.”

Mattress Paloma, is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. For more information, or to drop off a mattress, call 702-638-7856.

Contact Centennial and North Las Vegas View reporter James DeHaven at jdehaven@viewnews.com or 702-477-3839.