How "natural" is EcoGel?

Discussions General Mattresses Questions
1

First of all, thanks for the wealth of information here. It has been very helpful!

Last weekend I went out on my first round of visiting mattress stores. I had planned to just demo 100% natural latex mattresses but ended up also trying a couple mattresses that had an EcoGel comfort layer on top of a Talalay support layer. I really liked the memory-foam-like feel of these mattresses compared to the all latex mattresses I tried (I’m used to an innerspring mattress with a memory foam topper).

I read on this site (sorry, haven’t been able to find it for reference) that “natural” gel memory foam isn’t natural at all. Can someone elaborate on that? I’m not 100% set on buying an all-natural mattress, but if it is not all-natural I want to know what I’m getting into. Are there still harmful chemicals in EcoGel? Does EcoGel have OekoTex or Certi-Pur certification? Is there off-gassing?

It doesn’t provide a lot of details, but the mattress I’m looking at is:
http://www.mysleepnation.com/mattresses/memory-foam-mattresses/bonnie-brae-blvd

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi Egnix,

Gel memory foam is regular memory foam with some gel added into it in various ways (see post #2 here) and memory foam is certainly not a natural material. Some versions of memory foam or polyfoam replace a small percentage of one of the two main chemicals used to make the memory foam or polyfoam (the polyol) with a plant oil based derivative but the majority of the material is still memory foam that is made with petrochemicals. The gel that is added to gel memory foam is a “safe” material (see post #4 here).

While all foam materials (including latex) will have some offgassing or VOC’s, the gel memory foam is made in North America which means the foam manufacturer would be CertiPur certified for harmful substances and VOC’s so there is some assurance that the VOC’s are below the threshold that most people would be sensitive to and by most people’s standards it would certainly be “safe enough”.

Phoenix

3

Thanks!