The Crude Oil in Your Mattress and What’s Actually Off-Gassing While You Sleep
Many conventional mattresses contain polyurethane foam and other synthetic materials that can release VOCs. A mattress industry expert explains what off-gassing means, what to look for on a label, and how organic certifications can help consumers evaluate what they’re sleeping on.
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People read every ingredient on a food label. We check skincare products for parabens and phthalates. Almost nobody stops to ask what’s actually inside the mattress underneath them, the place where they’ll spend roughly a third of their life.
On a recent episode of the Live + Well podcast, host Melissa Magsaysay sat down with Arin Schultz, chief growth officer at Naturepedic, an organic mattress manufacturer who has spent more than a decade in the industry. “The amount of chemicals that go into making a mattress, it’s not one, it’s not two,” Schultz said. “There are over 100 different chemicals that go into making a mattress.”
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A standard queen-size mattress, he said, contains roughly 20 gallons of crude oil in the form of polyurethane foam, “the same stuff they’re pumping out of the ground, turning into gasoline.” That composition is also why conventional mattresses sleep hot, Schultz said: the foam retains body heat rather than dissipating it.
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Flame retardant chemicals came up as the more pointed concern. Federal flammability standards require mattresses to pass open-flame testing, and manufacturers using polyurethane foam have typically met that bar by treating the foam with additive chemicals. “It’s the flame retardant chemicals that go into it that are known carcinogens,” Schultz said. “That’s the thing that you’re also sleeping on every night.” He described how Naturepedic passes the same flammability tests, including a direct blowtorch test, using only wool, cotton, and latex layered in a specific way. “We don’t have a single extra chemical in there to protect those for those flame tests,” he said.
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Schultz said that roughly 87,000 chemicals are currently in use in the U.S., with government testing slow enough that only a small fraction have ever been formally evaluated and a handful outright banned. “We’re never going to know, as a society, what all these chemicals have been thrown into American culture in the last 50 years, what it’s ultimately going to do to us in the long run,” he said. Mattresses are one entry on a longer list of overlooked indoor air quality sources throughout a home.
He also pushed back on how the word “organic” gets used in mattress marketing. “Greenwashing is a real big thing,” Schultz said, noting that a mattress can wrap a layer of organic cotton around conventional polyurethane foam and still be marketed as organic. “It’s, for lack of a better term, throwing lipstick on a pig.”
He pointed to the Global Organic Textile Standard, or GOTS, as a more rigorous benchmark, saying that third-party auditors visit the factory multiple times a year, pull a mattress off the shelf at random, and trace its materials back to the specific farm and crop, along with reviewing labor and manufacturing practices. Naturepedic was also the first mattress brand verified by the Environmental Working Group, he said, a program EWG launched specifically because of how many different chemicals were showing up in mattress products.
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Schultz pointed to flooring and paint as other major sources of volatile organic compounds in a bedroom, and to furniture as a related blind spot, particularly in kids’ rooms, where furniture finishes carry their own set of chemical considerations and where some manufacturers have started applying food-safety standards to how furniture is built.
Schultz’s recommendation is to buy an organic mattress, and his business depends on people doing exactly that. He also offered a cheaper interim step for people not ready to replace a mattress: a waterproof organic cotton cover on top of an existing mattress, which won’t eliminate off-gassing from the layers underneath but creates some distance between a sleeper and the foam below.
Listen to the full conversation with Arin Schultz on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
