Trying to find a mattress with no off-gassing, please help!

[phoenix]

Hi Tim,

Thank you again for a very useful post. Going off of your recommendation I called around a couple of local retailers and ended up at two of the retailers that you recommended in your link, which then led me to only 2 possible mattresses that were memory foam Certipur certified.

Most of the North American foam manufacturers are CertiPur certified (you can see the list here*) but many mattress manufacturers that use CertiPur certified foams aren’t registered with CertiPur even though the foams they use are. You can see the list of manufacturers that are registered with CertiPur here*. If I was comfortable with polyfoam and memory foam in the first place (and there are many people that aren’t for either health or personal reasons) … I would also be comfortable with North American manufactured foams. Certipur certification (or a similar certification) would be more important to me if the foam was manufactured outside of North America … especially in Asia. For those who are chemically sensitive or who want to avoid “chemicals” for personal reasons … memory foam would normally be more of an issue than polyfoam or latex.

ADMIN NOTE: *Removed 404 link|Archived Footprint 1:certipur.us/pages/for-industry/find-a-foam-supplier/|Archived Footprint 2:certipur.us/pages/for-consumers/find-products/

1. Mlily USA, which claims to be Certipur certified for all their mattresses (I ended up liking the Energize hybrid). 1" bamboo infused memory foam, 3’ visco elastic memory foam, 7’" high resiliency base foam. A nice bonus is that the fire retardant layer was not chemical based but rather glass fiber. Antimicrobial, hypoallergenic claims on the website. But I had a couple of concerns. Red flag #1 - Made in China. Red flag #2- it still smelled!!! Red flag #3 - The website claimed “our memory foam mattresses are made with toxin-free polyfoam” which left me wondering-- does that mean the memory foam part is still toxic, and that there was just less of it? Apparently this company replaces part of the petroleum with castor plant oil, and the remaining petroleum is essentially covered with bamboo and aloe vera to make for a more “pleasant” smell.

There is some “bad” foam made in China and there are better foams as well. At least with foams that are CertiPur certified you have some reasonable assurance that they are “safe”. I would also keep in mind that smell and safety are not necessarily related because some of the potential VOC’s that can be most harmful don’t have a smell at all. Terms like “toxin free” really have no meaning because the chemicals used to make foam are toxic if you were to eat them. The goal is to make sure that they are safe for the use for which they are intended (sleeping) and that the polymers are stable and that any VOC’s are within a reasonable level of safety. Salt is made of sodium and chloride and chlorine can also be harmful if it isn’t chemically combined with something else. You can read more about so called “plant based” polyfoam or memory foam in post #2 here. They are still just polyfoam or memory foam that have had a small portion of one of the many petrochemicals used to make it replaced with a plant based chemical derivative.

2. Carolina Mattress Company - Cool Coil Medley. Another hybrid. Finally, I find something with no obvious odor, even brand new, and its made in the USA. 2" convoluted natural latex (what’s convoluted latex?), 1" cool breeze gel memory foam, 1.25" plush soy foam (is soy foam safer?), 875 individually wrapped coils, soyfoam encasement. No info about fire retardant layer. I couldn’t find any more information on the website, and I only have verification that its certipur certified from the sales person, not the actual product. I’m not sure if there is other information I need to gather about this company/mattress to determine whether it is “safe enough”, or whether I simply let my nose be the judge!

What a mattress smells like has little to do with its safety. Carolina Mattress Guild is on the list of CertiPur certified mattress manufacturers so you have some assurance that the foams they use are CertiPur certified.

I would also want to know the density of all the foam layers in both mattresses so you can make sure that they don’t have any “weak links” in terms of durability.

Any additional suggestions of things to look into would be helpful. Because of an ongoing health issue, I need to order an unusual size that would end up a special order, which means no returns/exchanges, so I am trying to make sure I have not missed anything!

If you can’t return a mattress then it becomes particularly important that you have done some careful and objective testing using the testing guidelines so you can come as close as possible to predicting your actual sleeping experience in terms of PPP. I would also make sure that you know the density of all the foam layers so you can identify any potential “weak links” in terms of durability.

I can’t find any retailers that carry dunlop latex locally

I believe that some of the Golden mattresses use Dunlop in the comfort layers and SavvyRest has Dunlop options as well. Some of the others on the list may also have some mattresses with Dunlop comfort layers but you would need to call and ask them what they carry on their showroom floor.

Phoenix