Victory Mission takes on mattress recycling for city, providing job skills, sustainability

Mattress recycling has been an option in Springfield since 2018. In addition to keeping old bedding out of the local landfill, the recycling program will now serve as a form of workforce development, following a partnership between Springfield Environmental Services and Victory Mission.

As part of the new program, mattresses brought for recycling at one of the three recycling drop-off centers will be broken down by those participating in Victory Mission's long-term restoration program. Victory Mission helps those coming out of poverty or incarceration by providing them with the tools to lead a stable, healthy and productive life.

One of Victory Mission's goals is to provide those they help with vocational training and workforce development.

Executive Director Jason Hynson said giving people the tools to be able to land jobs and work well is a large part of helping them get out of poverty.

Long-term program participants spend their first four months in the program attending classes half the day and working on the operations of the organization, whether that be cleaning or cooking.

"Work is a part of everybody's life, whether you get paid for it, or whether it's just like the house," Hynson said. "There's kind of a work process we all have to do. So we're reengaging that to our participants that are with us."

Working on work ethic

Chase McWilliams is one of Victory Mission's participants who has been working on recycling the mattresses. He started in the restoration program eight months ago after realizing he wanted to change his life, seven years of which had been spent in and out of jails and prisons.

"I was done with the life that I was living, but I didn't necessarily know exactly how to change how I was living," he said.

Before starting on the mattresses, McWilliams worked on recycling textiles that Victory Mission gathers from thrift stores and their own unusable clothing. The work on mattresses has been more engaging, he said.

"It was a change of pace from what I was doing," he said. "So, I was more than welcome to try something new."

Hynson said this is the general consensus among those working on the mattresses, especially when the work involves a greater good of helping the environment.

Being a part of the first cohort to be able to work on the new program is also a part of the excitement in McWilliams's eyes.

"It was really exciting to just see me and my coworkers kind of tackle a task that we were unsure about, and just watching us grow and learn and just make it to where it is today," he said. "It's exciting just to see how much more room for growth that it has."

McWilliams said the warehouse where mattresses are broken down receives 30-40 mattresses in each delivery, though the number of deliveries varies by week. Each mattress is broken down into three piles — fabric, foam and metal. For each mattress, about 80% of the materials can be recycled once disassembled.

After four months, restoration program participants can get jobs outside of the organization and start earning their own money while still receiving housing, food, clothing and support services from Victory Mission. Rather than go out and find an outside job, McWilliams decided to become a driver for Victory Mission, helping with donation pickups.

"I just felt like Victory Missions has done so much for me that I want to give back as much as I can to them," he said.

He said Victory Mission has taught him what it means to work and helped him develop a good work ethic.

Environmental impact combined with community

Erick Roberts, assistant director of Springfield Environmental Services, said before this partnership, the city contracted BedHead Mattress Recycling for the service, for which the city charges a $15 drop-off fee per mattress. The owners at BedHead were getting ready to retire and the five-year contract was coming to a close, Roberts said, so the city was on the lookout for an alternative way to continue the program.

Both Roberts and Hynson credited Barbara Lucks, who was the city's first sustainability officer, with bringing the two entities together. Now, the city has a five-year contract with Victory Mission that will be renewed annually. Hynson said the program will bring an additional $50,000-60,000 in revenue every year.

The recycling program is an essential part of the city's sustainability efforts.

"Mattresses, by their very nature, are created to have a long life or you know, sort of be indestructible and they consume a lot of space in the landfill because of that fact that they don't compact very well, they don't break down very quickly at all," Roberts said.

With this partnership, the impact of the program has only expanded. Roberts said the recycling program directly gives back to the community and gives Victory Mission's participants work-related skills that they can use in the future.

For participants themselves, the larger impact also plays a role in their work.

"It's cool that, you know, we get to help the community, they [the participants] really kind of catch the vision of keeping all those mattresses out of the landfill," Hynson said.

From cooks to transferable skills

Familiar to many, Victory Mission used to operate a restaurant, known as Cook's Kettle. The restaurant was a part of a culinary work program for participants.

Hynson said that while participants still cook, this is more a part of the operational vocational tasks to provide meals to the restoration program participants and those staying at Victory Mission's emergency shelter. He said now the focus is more on giving participants experience to give them transferable skills in the future no matter the industry they join.

"We were looking for more of the transferable pieces, and not necessarily, 'Hey, we've created a chef,'" he said.

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Now, Victory Mission has their own coffee brand, Equip Coffee, that gives them a similar consumer experience with the community yet gives participants the opportunity to work on it in a way that develops skills useful for any job.

"We're still using the same mechanisms with a more shelf-stable and less of a direct customer engagement," Hynson said.

Marta Mieze covers local government at the News-Leader. Contact her with tips at mmieze@news-leader.com.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Mattress recycling gives Victory Mission more job opportunities