All posts tagged United States

Transportation of discarded mattresses to the mattress recycling facility is one of the largest cost centers of doing business and is quite complicated for a sole proprietor running the mattress recycling facility. That sole proprietor has his hands full focusing on recycling mattresses in his facility. In today’s business world these necessary but difficult and labor intensive tasks are often “outsourced.” While the United States policies which have resulted in millions of American jobs being sent off shore under the label of outsourcing has recently gained negative opinions – the work at home cottage industries have thrived for centuries.

Going back as far as the 1400s the putting-out system or the workshop system or the domestic system were manufacturing models where jobs were contracted by a single manufacturer to subcontractors who completed the work in their own facility, usually their own home.

This subcontracting served as a way for manufacturing entrepreneurs to have subcontractor workers work in their homes manufacturing individual articles that when finished were brought to the contractor’s central place of business, such as a marketplace or a factory in a larger town, to be assembled and sold as finished goods.

These cottage industries flourished in the European cloth production as well as in various other industries, including the manufacture of wrought iron ironware such as pins, pots, and pans. The the manufacturer frequently provided the raw materials to their subcontractors to process in their homes.

Then, as now, the cottage industry conducted in individual’s homes had a lot to do with people’s desire to work at home rather than in a centralized factory or other location. Normally, instead of mass produced products, these home based businesses focus on unique or distinctive products in niche markets where large manufacturers can not find an economy of scale. When economy of scale can be achieved, then the cottage industries face serious competitive disadvantages from large manufacturers.

Currently, workers – many of them women with children – desire to remain at home while concurrently satisfying their need to make money has rapidly expanded the Internet based cottage industries. Examples of successfully Internet spun cottage industries are the popular iPhone applications where programmers develop “apps” and then sell them to iPhone . eBay is a giant source for cottage industries with work at home individuals buying and selling collectibles and other goods and service on the eBay website. Even some small manufacturers and craftspeople use eBay as a central site for selling their finished goods and services. Work at home authors can write their ebooks in the comfort of their living room and then use the Internet to market their products on websites such as Amazon. These authors may well do their background research at home or at their local library instead of at a centralized office.

In the 1400’s, the cottage industry served as a means for entrepreneurs to bypass the cumbersome and inflexible guild system. Today’s motivation may well be that there are simply no traditional jobs to be found that pay well enough to support the worker’s family or the worker wants to avoid the stresses of corporate jobs by working at their own speed and on their own schedule. For Mothers wanting to avoid the perils of daycare, their motivation is that they can work at home while watching their own children.

The European domestic system is often credited as being a source of the large amount of profits enjoyed by common people which made them less dependent on wealthy land barons. This increase in wages also led to a much wealthier peasantry with more personal belongings, with higher quality food to eat, with more fashionable clothing and with a better education than they had enjoyed prior to entering into cottage industries.

The cottage industry model has worked very well in the past and is definitely working well on Internet related businesses today. Could it also work today as a way to resolve the mattress recycler’s headache of getting unwanted mattresses out of homes and into the mattress recycling facility? Has economy of scale already been reached by the curbside trash haulers?

Every area is different, but the visual key to initially evaluating how well the curbside trash haulers are doing with mattress pickup and disposal – is noticing how many discarded mattresses lie on the roadsides. If there are none, someone has already figured out and implemented a working mattress pickup and disposal process. If you see mattresses everywhere along the roadsides, opportunity for a cottage industry mattress pickup system exists. Like moving furniture, two men and a truck might be all that is needed to implement a mattress pickup and disposal cottage industry.

If you Google “Junk Haulers” you will quickly see that the mattress pickup cottage industry has already been implemented by a host of junk hauling companies helping individual homeowners unclutter their residences by coming to their homes and removing – among other things – unwanted mattresses, box springs and stuffed furniture. These cottage industry people do a wonderful job of assisting home owners and getting mattresses off their premises. What is missing in the majority of cities is the mattress recycling facility where these current day entrepreneurs can deliver the mattresses, box springs and stuffed furniture for recycling. Thus today, cottage industry people with strong backs and a truck or trailer are indeed able to pickup mattresses from home owners and haul them off to the landfill.

So, the real question is where are the mattress recyclers?