After much reading and re-reading on this wonderful site, this is what boils down for me. There need to be 2 categories of information provided by latex suppliers/manufacturers/dealers: 1) the Process used - either Dunlop or Talalay and 2) the list of components/ingredients in any given mattress slab, in descending order.
Using the food analogy Iāve read here about angel food versus pound cake, there is a baffling tendency to get the cake pan and oven technology mixed up with understanding what exactly is in the cake batter. I think I understand what āorganicā means - the latex batter has to be free of certain contaminants and the processor must not allow the batter to become contaminated in the facility. The term ānaturalā has no precise industry definition and is thus useless to the consumer. One might discuss the term ānaturalā with different mattress retailers in hopes of figuring out what it means to them but unless the list of ingredients is know by the retailer, the term ānaturalā is meaningless.
Does what Iām saying make sense? Does anyone know exactly what is in any given batch of latex that is poured into the molds of either a Dunlop or Talalay processed mattress? Does anyone provide this kind of labeling information on the end product mattress slabs?
Your suggestions / comments make sense to me as a consumer, for sure!
That said, if you want to think about it from businessās perspective, ask yourself this: how does a latex / bedding company make more money by doing what you said?
The processes you speak of arenāt free, and there are several reasons I can think of that they would not want to do this- not the least of which is they might not want to tell everyone the things they do which they consider proprietary and part of the special attributes of their own product. Check how many people are trying to copy termpurpedic (I know, itās not latex, butā¦) - what incentive do they have to disclose all those details? They just educate their competitors and make it easier for them to tell the customers that their foam is identical to tempurpedic foam.
Whether consumers like it or not, many/most companies spend lots of time and money trying to develop a product better than the rest, or with certain qualities that people like. Once a company has spent that money doing that, itās rarely the case they want to go tell everyone how to duplicate their product
Consider talalay latexā¦ Thereās basically only 2 vendors as far as I know. Radium and Latex International. They own the marketā¦ They donāt need to provide any extra info and theyāll still own the market. How do they make more money by implementing what you want?
Some Dunlop latex manufacturers are pretty/completely open about what goes into their latex. Iāve seen several breakdowns posted from reputable sources, although I canāt remember one off the top of my head.
That would be helpful, but manufacturers will not give their exact ingredients, and resellers will not give you a reason to buy from someone else.
Your best bet is to know roughly what you are looking for so that you can ignore the misinformation. This may still leave you uninformed when the information is not there.
Some simple definitionsā¦
The two manufacturing processes are Dunlop and Talalay.
The Latex foam rubber can be mostly NATURAL Latex (100% Natural/ALL Natural/Organic Latex) or a BLEND of NATURAL Latex and SYNTHETIC Latex (blended 30/70, for example)ā¦ both with some miscellaneous ingredients. Latex foam rubber that is mostly SYNTHETIC Latex would not be typical since it lacks the desired attributes of NATURAL Latex.
ā100% Latexā should mean that the mattress is a Latex mattress and does not include non-Latex materials like innersprings or poly foam, except the cover. But this term is misused and abused and confused with ā100% Naturalā.
ā100% Natural/ALL Naturalā should just mean NATURAL Latex, but the term NATURAL has been misused to suggest that the presence of natural Latex in a less than 100% Latex mattress or in a blended Latex mattress makes the mattress a NATURAL Latex mattress. It does not. So, marketing has introduced 100% Natural/ALL Natural to really mean NATURAL. Latex International (LI) now markets their NATURAL as ALL Natural, and their BLENDED as Naturalā¦ a decision that garners much disrespect for their company, imo.
āOrganicā generally means that the NATURAL Latex is produced by organic farming methods. It remains for you to decide what that means for any given mattress that may include such organic NATURAL Latex. Certainly, it will cost you more. But does it mean that the entire product life cycle is pure and pristine, void of human exploitation and planet degradation, and less hazardous to your health? I doubt it. Does it make a better mattress. I donāt think so. At most, I would pursue a 100% natural Latex mattress with āorganicā fabrics, if I were most interested in eliminating hazardous chemicals, but even for that, I have no reservation with sleeping on blended Latex which has been certified chemically non-hazardous to humans (such as for LIās products).
Dunlop is a cheaper, more pervasive process that can afford using NATURAL to gain that marketing edge and those perceived attributes. It traditionally produces a denser Latex foam rubber that may be better suited for the support core layer.
Talalay is a more expensive, less available process that benefits economically and technically from using BLENDED, but which has introduced NATURAL more recently to compete in the green market space, imo. It produces a less dense Latex foam rubber, particularly at the lower firmness range, that may be better suited for the top comfort layer.
Aside from the market availability, a significant difference is that Dunlop gets firmer faster as it compresses, offering more certain support. Also, I sense some significant support issues for some using Talalay in the support core layer. This could be a combination of Talalayās compression-firmness response not being good support for some body weight distributions and/or some Talalay product be poorly formulated/processed. All of which leads me to favor Dunlop for the support core layer, if I had the luxury of picking and choosing.
dn wrote:
(That said, if you want to think about it from businessās perspective, ask yourself this: how does a latex / bedding company make more money by doing what you said?
The processes you speak of arenāt free, and there are several reasons I can think of that they would not want to do this- not the least of which is they might not want to tell everyone the things they do which they consider proprietary and part of the special attributes of their own product. Check how many people are trying to copy termpurpedic (I know, itās not latex, butā¦) - what incentive do they have to disclose all those details? They just educate their competitors and make it easier for them to tell the customers that their foam is identical to tempurpedic foam.)
DB replies:
Thanks for responding. I understand there may be economic arguments for keeping trade secrets. And there are also arguments, whether manufacturers like it or not , for disclosing potentially unsafe ingredients. For me, an important reason for turning to latex as a mattress choice was thinking it was a less-toxic, more environmentally sound way to go. The extent to which this isnāt true is a predictor of losing me and a growing number of other concerned people as customers. Thatās a consideration that the savvy businessperson might want to factor into the how-to-do-business equation.
(Whether consumers like it or not, many/most companies spend lots of time and money trying to develop a product better than the rest, or with certain qualities that people like. Once a company has spent that money doing that, itās rarely the case they want to go tell everyone how to duplicate their product)
DB: Sooner or later the secrets will come out and competition will increase. Its fairly inevitable in our system, both that things will be figured out by smart people and also that secrets are becoming more and more a thing of the past. What youāre left with then is customer loyalty. My loyalty is based on whether any given producer shows evidence of caring about my health and welfare along with their own bottom line.
(Consider talalay latexā¦ Thereās basically only 2 vendors as far as I know. Radium and Latex International. They own the marketā¦ They donāt need to provide any extra info and theyāll still own the market. How do they make more money by implementing what you want?
DB: Forgive me for being so blunt but that seems to me to be their problem. It certainly appears that there are plenty of people willing to trade off having some petrochemical synthetics in their mattress in order to economize. My basic argument is that there should be clear information available when it comes to public health issues, regardless, and it should be thought of as a cost of doing business.
(Some Dunlop latex manufacturers are pretty/completely open about what goes into their latex. Iāve seen several breakdowns posted from reputable sources, although I canāt remember one off the top of my head.)
And I am in their customer base, willing to pay more for what I view as a safer product and preferring to do business with companies concerned about the effect of their product on me and the environment.
Well, if it is important to you, there are options.
I bought a Green Sleep mattress through tmasc.ca. The folks at tmasc absolutely delighted me with their service and quality of their products. As it relates to this discussion, Green Sleep publishes their eco institut report for safety http://www.greensleep.com/Europe/Great-Brittain/EN/PDF/Hevea.pdf
I am a big fan of the open disclosure of qualitative and quantitative information by mattress manufacturers. This would include the type and density of any polyfoam and memory foam in the mattress or the type and blend of any latex or the certifications for their materials as some examples. This (and other similar types of information) would allow for meaningful comparisons in terms of quality, value, and safety.
Besides this though there are legitimate reasons to keep some information proprietary and would only be disclosed at the discretion of a manufacturer. This would include things like the ILD of any foam layers, the supplier of their materials, or things that are connected to the operation of a business or their business model.
I would agree that the type and blend of any latex is important information to have (at least to the degree that a blend can be accurate because it can also change and would be inside a range). The specific compounding formula of the latex though would still be proprietary information and is a closely guarded secret by latex manufacturers for competitive reasons. The āsafetyā of their formulation would be a matter of releasing their certifications because I donāt think that the specific formula would be relevant to most consumers who donāt have a degree in materials science and wouldnāt understand it anyway or would take it out of context.
The raw latex is only one level of organic certification and applies to whether an agricultural material is USDA certified. There are two other levels of āorganicā certifications (see post #2 here) that apply to the manufacturing of a component or product (or a latex core) and to the combination of components that are assembled into a final mattress.
I would agree with this for the most part and the word has many meanings that can be confusing or misleading in actual use to say the least. It can still be useful to some degree though to differentiate raw materials that exist in nature from materials that are the result of a manufacturing process that donāt exist in nature for those where this may be important.
What you are saying makes perfect sense and you can see a more detailed discussion of many of the substances used to make latex and a generic description of a latex compounding formula here but no manufacturer is likely to release the specifics of their formula and to determine the āsafetyā of any material you would be dependent on the certifications which is the āend resultā rather than the actual chemicals that are used which may or may not indicate its safety. There are many synthetic chemicals that are completely āsafeā as a fully reacted combination or polymer from the perspective of their ability to cause harm while the individual chemicals used to manufacture them may not be when they are considered one at a time. Of course, regardless of whether a material is natural or synthetic, this doesnāt necessarily take into account any āharmā they may do to the environment or the harm they may do in other ways to certain cultures or people or the amount of non renewable energy or resources they consume in their manufacturing, transportation, or the final decomposition or recycling of the materials which for some people may be just as important as any harm they may cause in actual use.
Natural rubber (NR) has a precise enough industry definitionā¦ it is rubber made from the natural Latex harvested from Hevea brasiliensis rubber trees. It is not Styrene-Butadiene rubber (SBR), the rubber made from synthetic Latex, a man-made molecular equivalent of natural Latex.
A NATURAL Latex foam rubber mattress should have very little or no synthetic Latex in it. This terminology is not confusing nor useless, and should not be dismissed just because some misuse it or are confused by it.
It can certainly be confusing when the percentage of natural rubber isnāt specified because some companies (such as latex International) call their blended latex with 30% natural rubber ānaturalā and their latex which uses 100% natural rubber is called āall naturalā. Many retailers that sell the blend it donāt even realize that itās not ānaturalā by any meaningful definition of the word. Other manufacturers also have a different ādefinitionā of natural that can vary widely. Itās the same when many polyfoam manufacturers replace a small percentage of their petrochemical polyols with a small percentage of polyols that are derived or chemically synthesized from a plant oil and then call the resulting foam ānaturalā. Viscose is another example where a fabric is made from cellulose derived from plants or wood but is anything but a ānaturalā material when it comes to its production or the final product.
Like you I also think that the word ānaturalā should have more meaning than it does in the current market but the devil is in the details and in the transparency or specific definitions of the manufacturers that use it to describe their products. Without a āqualifierā or percentage attached it has much less meaning and can end up being just another misleading marketing term with no way to differentiate ānaturalā that means something and ānaturalā that means very little.
, for disclosing potentially unsafe ingredients. For me, an important reason for turning to latex as a mattress choice was thinking it was a less-toxic, more environmentally sound way to go. The extent to which this isnāt true is a predictor of losing me and a growing number of other concerned people as customers. Thatās a consideration that the savvy businessperson might want to factor into the how-to-do-business equation.