The trashman will no longer pick up people’s used, stained, smelly or otherwise funkified mattresses in Sweetwater County.

The Rock Springs Landfill won’t bury them anymore, either. The used, gnarly, sweaty, unwanted giant cushions of coil and memory foam simply take up too much space.

Instead, mattresses are being sent to Utah for recycling instead of taking up space in a Wyoming landfill. It’s part of a long-term goal to save space and material, and has already exceeded expectations.  

The drawback: It’s up to county residents to bring their mattresses to the local drop-off point themselves. And that’s what residents will have to do if they want to get rid of them.

Sweetwater County Solid Waste District No. 1 is no longer burying mattresses in its landfill, and Wyoming Waste Systems — which collects trash throughout central and southern Wyoming — is no longer collecting them.

“We started on Oct. 1, and we’ve already diverted 178 mattresses,” said Dan Chetterbock, general manager of the Rock Springs Landfill. “And we can already see the benefits.”

Too Much Fill

The new no-mattress policy was given the green light to save space and hassle at the Rock Springs Landfill.

“The idea behind the landfill is to pack everything in until there’s no airspace,” said Michelle Foote, site manager for Wyoming Waste Systems in Rock Springs. “A mattress does not compact or decompose. They don’t want them in the landfill.”

Chetterbock said mattresses are particularly problematic for the machinery constantly compacting the perpetually growing layers of trash.

“I’ve seen mattresses wrap around compactor wheels and break machinery,” he said. “Mattresses do not compact. We wanted to extend the lifespan of the landfill and give the community a different avenue to get rid of their mattresses.”

Spring Back

Spring Back Recycling is a nonprofit organization with programs in Utah, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington. It recycles or repurposes up to 95% of mattresses’ components for various uses, repurposing materials that would otherwise be squandered in landfills.

“We work with residents, municipalities, landfills and transfer stations to create as much landfill and waste diversion as we can,” said Peter Conway, president of Spring Back Colorado. “We extract the cotton, foam, steel and wood from each mattress and ship those materials to our recycling partners.”

Conway added that Spring Back Recycling employs “disenfranchised” people who are in drug and alcohol recovery centers, recently released from incarceration or “just trying to find footing in society.”

“Redemptive employment helps these folks find stable employment, get long-term housing, and become tax-paying members of society,” he said. “And, in the process, we’re diverting millions of pounds of materials from landfills each year.”

Same Place, Different Destination

When a Sweetwater County resident wants to dispose of a mattress, it still goes to the Rock Springs Landfill. It just doesn’t end up inside it.

Spring Back Utah drops an empty Convex container at the landfill for people to drop off their mattresses. When it’s full, usually around 60-70 mattresses, the container is transported to the recycling facility in Salt Lake City.

Storing the discarded mattresses keeps them in a good enough condition to be recycled. That’s why Wyoming Waste Systems no longer takes them out with the trash.

“The mattresses have got to stay dry,” Foote said. “The company must do certain things with them to make them reusable or whatever they do to recycle them. The landfill still accepts mattresses. We just don’t mix them with the trash when we pick it up.”

Cost Sharing

Spring Back Recycling pays trucking companies to pick up and drop off the containers and passes those costs to its partners and customers. That means Sweetwater County is paying to keep the landfill mattress-free.

Chetterbock said Sweetwater County Solid Waste District No. 1’s mill levy covers the cost of transporting the mattresses from Rock Springs to Salt Lake City. However, residents outside the district incur some additional costs.

“If you live in or are a district resident, there’s no cost to you,” he said. “That cost was absorbed in the mill levy. We charge $35 per mattress for anyone outside our district and for in-district businesses.”

The cost of transporting mattresses out of the landfill is offset by the benefits of eliminating mattresses from ending up inside. Landfills don’t want them, and Spring Back Recycling is ready to take them.

Less Space, Better Space

After one month of the new mattress recycling program, Chetterbock is impressed with the results. Mattresses occasionally show up in garbage trucks, but none make it into the landfill.

“We’re seeing the benefits in airspace right away,” he said. “Our software is showing greater compaction between what we had before and what we have now.”

Chetterbock anticipated Spring Back Utah would make one trip a month to the Rock Springs Landfill to pick up and replace the mattress container. Since Oct. 1, they’ve already made three trips and are getting close to needing a fourth.

“It’s better air space utilization and better utilization of the mattresses,” he said. “I think it’s going really good, and we’re happy with the results so far.”

Do It Yourself (For Now)

While the occasional mattress still ends up in a garbage truckload, no mattresses are going into the Rock Springs Landfill. The challenge for Sweetwater County residents is that they’ll have to find their own way to get their mattresses there.

“Customers are asked to transport mattresses to the landfill directly,” she said. “All of our drivers have specific routes that they go out on every day, so we don’t have the manpower or the time to pick up mattresses.”

Chetterbock said that hasn’t been an issue so far.

“Other than some commercial loads and roll-off bins from waste haulers, everybody that hauls mattresses here hasn’t had a problem putting them where they need to go when they get out here,” he said.

Cycling Upward

Sweetwater County isn’t the only Wyoming community that’s expressed an interest in recycling mattresses. Conway said he’s been approached by other Wyoming communities about starting their own mattress recycling programs.

“I advised them that if they could figure out a way to get them to us, we can definitely recycle them,” he said.

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.

A 22-year-old Wyomingite is dead following a head-on collision on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

The crash happened around 3:17 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 8 at milepost 5.9 on Wyoming 132 (Blue Sky Highway), about a mile south of Ethete or about 15 miles north of Lander.

According to a fatality crash summary from the Wyoming Highway Patrol, a Pontiac was headed southbound when the driver attempted to pass another southbound vehicle and collided head-on with an oncoming Dodge.

“The Dodge attempted to steer towards the southbound lane to avoid a collision,” the summary reads. “The Pontiac steered back toward the southbound lane and impacted the Dodge head-on in the southbound lane.”

1 Killed, 3 Injured

The collision left unbuckled passenger Precious Gould dead and both drivers and another passenger injured.

Driver Inattention

The summary lists driver inattention as a possible contributing factor.

Gould is the 97th reported person to die on Wyoming’s highways this year.

It may soon be easier for Wyoming property owners to obtain local law enforcement’s help removing squatters. 

The Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee voted 10-4 on Thursday to sponsor a bill creating a process for property owners to request law-enforcement assistance in removing unauthorized occupants from a residential property. The bill also creates additional criminal trespassing offenses. 

The committee worked the bill throughout the Legislature’s off-season, also known as the interim, after hearing concerns from property owners, including one Casper woman who described hitting a dead-end with police after finding six squatters on one of her properties. 

The squatters eventually left, but Sen. Jim Anderson (R-Casper) told the committee the incident highlighted a gap in the law and that legislation was needed. Lawmakers obliged, formed a working group and drafted legislation largely resembling a Florida law enacted this summer. 

The final legislation sponsored by the committee would make squatting that involves property destruction a felony offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

Most of the lawmakers’ discussion on the bill Thursday involved amendments, but the committee’s two Democrats voiced concerns that the bill needed more work and could cause more harm than good. 

“I like limiting this bill to squatters. That’s perfect. That’s a good thing. That’s one of the big improvements we made to this bill,” Rep. Ken Chestek (D-Laramie) said. 

Trespass and eviction statutes already on the books are sufficient, Chestek said, “and those remedies incorporate due process and have real judges deciding who has rights and who doesn’t have rights.”

Chestek and Rep. Karlee Provenza (D-Laramie) voted against the bill alongside Freedom Caucus members Reps. Jeremy Haroldson (R-Wheatland) and Mark Jennings (R-Sheridan). 

Discussion 

While working the bill throughout the interim, the committee heard conflicting testimony from law enforcement on its necessity. 

“We hear from some who say the existing trespass statute works most of the time for most of the circumstances,” Rep. Art Washut (R-Casper) said at Thursday’s meeting. “And we hear others who say, ‘No, we need some changes.’ And so it’s interesting as we hear these different opinions about what the law needs to be in order to achieve the goal that we’re looking for here.”

Converse County Sheriff Clint Becker told the committee trespassing laws already on the books have been sufficient in Douglas for dealing with squatters, but that might not hold true elsewhere. 

“I can’t talk for the larger cities,” Becker said. 

Evansville Police Chief Mike Thompson, on the other hand, said he had concerns about the bill being limited to residential properties. 

“Squatting isn’t, it isn’t just to residential dwellings. It can be any particular property. And so that’s part of the mud of this,” Thompson said. “You take like a camp or a tent or like an RV bus. Those can be considered, you know, residential dwellings, in a sense, by law.”

Rep. Ember Oakley (R-Riverton) discouraged the committee from widening the legislation’s scope. 

“My thought on this bill is we’re trying to keep this specific and narrow,” Oakley said. “[It’s] not about renters, not about tenants, not about eviction. This is a specific, narrow [bill] about people squatting in a house.”

As the bill proposes, a property owner can ask local law enforcement for “the immediate removal of any person unlawfully occupying or possessing the owner’s residential dwelling” if two conditions are met. 

For one, the person requesting the removal must be the property owner or “the owner’s authorized agent,” the bill states. Secondly, the “‘unauthorized person’ means a person who is not authorized or is no longer authorized to maintain presence or residency in a residential dwelling.”

An earlier draft of the bill included a third requirement that the property owner first ask the squatter in person or in writing to vacate, but the committee agreed with Rep. Barry Crago’s (R-Buffalo) suggestion to strike it. 

“I know based on previous testimony we heard at our prior meeting that that particular person was brave enough to go ask [squatters] to leave, but some people shouldn’t be brave enough to go ask them to leave,” he said. “I think there could be some situations where that ends poorly.”

Additionally, the bill requires law enforcement to “verify that the person who submitted the complaint is the record owner of the residential dwelling or the authorized agent of the owner.”

The committee also amended the bill’s definition of an “unauthorized person” and specified that the definition does not include a current or former tenant. 

That was a much-needed adjustment, according to Allen Thompson, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. 

“I would say that our membership … would be very appreciative of this tenancy issue being put in here, because that was our concern from a liability standpoint,” Thompson said. “If someone had been a tenant and were afforded rights as a tenant, and we got in the middle of that process, regardless of if the law allows it, I think it would bring liability on the law enforcement.” 

In Wyoming, sheriff’s offices usually deal with evictions, and less so municipal officers. The bill would authorize both kinds of law enforcement to remove squatters. That was a concern for Rep. Provenza, who insisted the bill still needed more work. 

“We’ve done good work today, committee, on cleaning up this bill, but golly gee, it used to mean something that a bill wasn’t ready for prime time,” Provenza said. 

Ultimately, the committee voted 10-4 to sponsor the bill. 

“Thank you for your efforts on that bill, committee,” Sen. Bill Landen (R-Casper) said following the vote. “Still some work to do, perhaps, but glad we’re able to continue on.”

The general session begins Jan. 14. 

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