Post by KAMAT GmbH & Co. KG

⚡ Mattress recycling has a mechanical problem, and the answer turned out to be water. A mattress is a composite built to never come apart: steel springs, polyurethane foam, latex, and textiles, bonded and stitched together. That's the whole point in a bedroom and the whole problem in a recycling line. Mechanical shredders don't love this mix. Springs wrap around the blades, foam gums up the cutters, and the steel wears the tooling fast. So a lot of mattresses still go to incineration, not because nobody wants the materials back, but because separating them cleanly is hard. The system we built for an international recycling operation takes a different route. Instead of grinding the composite apart, a high-pressure water jet cuts it apart, cold. 2,300 bar, 122 l/min, 530 kW of drive power running in continuous duty. Two things matter about doing it this way. First, the cut is cold, so the foam isn't thermally degraded and stays good enough to go back into rebonded foam rather than landfill. Thermal cutting would burn off exactly the value you're trying to recover. Second, water doesn't dull against steel the way a blade does, so the process handles the spring-and-foam mix without the constant tooling wear that makes mechanical lines expensive to run. The output is the part that actually counts: steel and foam coming off the line as separated, reusable fractions instead of mixed waste. Pump head is our A1 ultra-high-pressure variant, wetted parts in stainless. Engineered and built in Witten. For anyone running separation or shredding lines: where does tooling wear cost you the most right now, mixed-material feed or the abrasive stuff? #KAMAT #HighPressureTechnology #Recycling #CircularEconomy #MadeInGermany