My wife and I live in the Tampa Bay area and are looking for a new mattress. After seeing your site and reading some of the information, I was wondering what insight you may have on the Green Earth series of mattresses by Body Rest? Is it something too new we should stay away from? Also, just to give you a little background on what we are looking for and we are open to any suggestions (obviously knowing it is ultimately about personal preferences), but we are looking for a firmer bed that has a little cushioning. We both sleep mostly on our backs/sides and I would love to find some thing that is pretty breathable or better at keeping cool - what seems like year-long summers and high humidity are killer for sleeping, even with the air conditioning going. That is why I was looking at the Green Earth series - seemed like the bamboo may be good for keeping cooler. Appreciate your help and all the info here on the site!!
Hi miketampa75,
The Bodyrest Green Karma mattresses are intriguing and there is more information about the materials they use in them on the indratech site here.
Recycled polymer fibers like these (which can use recycled bottles as a source material) hold some real promise IMO and while I don’t have real life information about their long term durability … and the pressure relieving and support qualities are important to test like with any other mattress … my sense is that they would be a good “less toxic” and durable material and well worth considering for those who don’t mind using materials that don’t have a long track record for use in mattresses.
This of course could be accomplished with a wide variety of materials in both the support layers and the comfort layers. This would typically involve a firmer support core and then a thinner comfort layer (either one or two sided) that used durable and breathable materials. While the indratech material would certainly be an option, other materials could also create this same general combination. This is somewhat moot though because these materials are used in the Green Karma line and not the Green Earth line.
I don’t know the specific qualities of indratech in terms of breathability but it would seem to me that it would be on the more breathable end of the scale in terms of cushioning materials. This is just speculation though in the absence of any real information. temperature regulation is also a combination of many factors in the mattress layers, the ticking and quilting used, the mattress protector, sheets, bedclothes, and the room environment and the sleeper themselves. All of these work together to make good temperature regulation possible for almost anyone. Post #2 here has more information about this.
All of this again though applies to their Green Karma mattress line than the Green Earth mattress line. the Green Earth uses innersprings, polyfoam, and latex in various combinations and are comparable to mattresses made by many other manufacturers and their quality and value would depend on knowing the quality/density specs of the materials and layers in their mattresses … particularly any polyfoam (soy foam) used in the upper layers.
They have a good comparison between cotton and bamboo on their site here although I would question some of the individual parts. For example … cotton can be a very “wicking” material (which is why it is used in certain layers of clothing for example) but it doesn’t absorb as much moisture as well as bamboo. Post #2 here (towards the end of the post) has a couple of links that also compare bamboo and cotton. Bamboo is also a cellulosic material (like rayon, Tencel, Micromodal and many others) which has a natural source but by the time it is made into a fiber is no longer natural and doesn’t use “natural” methods of production like cotton. A couple of good articles about bamboo fibers are here and here and here. While they do use “pure” bamboo (which may have less wet strength than cotton or bamboo blends) in their ticking … there are many other manufacturers that use bamboo or bamboo blends in their mattress ticking and this is widely available (along with other cellulosic fibers) so this alone would not be a reason I would be focused on the BodyRest line.
I can also say from personal experience that I buy bamboo blend socks because I really like how they perform and feel but they have not been as durable as cotton in my experience.
Hope this helps.
Phoenix