Recyc Matelas Europe

« We have all at some point in our lives as city dwellers come across a mattress abandoned in the street. But what do we do with it? After investigating the existing solution, it seemed highly insufficient to me, both ecologically and economically. A new answer had to be found. »

Jérémy Settbon

« I have everything except the background of a classic entrepreneur. »

I’m even quite far from it. After a degree in performing arts, I started my career selling books in outdoor markets and then went into advertising. The idea of Recyc Matelas Europe (RME) came about through a combination of circumstances and is at the convergence of an encounter, a legislative opportunity and the desire to create meaning.

The idea came to me from a question that we have all asked ourselves one day or another in our lives, at least all those who have been city dwellers at some point.

What do we do with all the mattresses that are lying around in the street?

Are they sent to the recycling centre or to bulky waste? The answer: we bury them, and that takes up a lot of space. Then, with the Grenelle II law in France, a legislative opportunity appeared. Concretely, this law makes furniture (including mattress) producers responsible for managing the end of life of products placed on the market.

 

When I learned that about this law, I told myself that it was the right time to create Recyc Matelas Europe.

Initially, finding the business model was extremely complicated. The first idea we had with my business partner, Franck Berrebi, was to go around collecting the mattresses and to get paid for this, and then to also get paid by selling the raw materials resulting from dismantling for which we would find outlets. That’s a lot of materials since we recycle 100% of the raw materials: polyurethane foams in construction, latex for carpets intended for dairy farms. Mixed fabrics, for their part, go into energy recovery… There are so many buyers that need to be found. But then everyone told us: “Open a factory and we will send you all our mattresses.”

 

The problem is that we opened a factory, and then no mattresses arrived!

We therefore had to test the entire industrial process by going to collect ourselves the first mattresses placed in the street, on the sidewalks.

 

The dismantling of mattresses and the recovery of raw materials is friendly for the environment.

Recyc Matelas Europe has a positive environmental impact linked to its economic activity. The more we grow, the more we have a positive impact on the environment because the more waste is recovered. Initially, we mainly employed people far from the job market, and these people constituted the core of our staff. However, at some point, we had to change scale, especially when we had to operate five factories instead of one.

 

This is where Impact Partners told us about the “integration company” approval.

We went from around ten employees to around a hundred. This makes us proud today– change is not just made at the voting box! It is also the initiatives of all of us that allow the world to change for the better. The decision to become an integration company led us to gain in competitiveness, by giving a comparative advantage over our competitors.

 

Our clients are communities that value job creation for the most precarious.

Being an insertion company puts us in a sweet spot to be able to win certain bids. Public sector buyers are required to choose the lowest bid, but there is an exception—thanks to the notion of “social clauses” that they can use within the context of public contracts, we can stand out. RME reconciles economic, social, and ecological performance. In the absence of a binding legislative framework on waste management as in Eastern Europe, it is sometimes more difficult to develop in certain Western European countries. The question of outlets is also certainly the most complicated to resolve once this first hurdle has been overcome: finding the client abroad to sell the secondary raw material to is not always easy, not to mention the question of transporting it.

 

It’s a whole virtuous ecosystem that must be created wherever we wish to establish ourselves.

Our development priorities are primarily focused on countries that have a mandated framework on waste.

 

The easiest thing to do first was to expand within France, going from one to five factories. Then we tackled Belgium, where a law of the same type as the Grenelle II law had just been voted.

We thought (wrongly) that it would take us less time to establish ourselves in Belgium given that we had already tested the whole process in France. In the end, everything was also long and complicated, but we now have a factory in Wallonia. It’s a long process, because once the factory was operational, we had to wait again until we had the necessary volumes of materials to process! Each country has its specificities, which limits our international expansion. The important thing, and it must be emphasized, is that all European countries want to do more to preserve the environment. Everywhere on the continent we share this value.

 

At the moment we are working to expand into Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria and Germany.

These are all countries that we had prospected with the support of Impact Partners and for which we are now waiting for the legislative context to advance to make our move. In these countries, we are at the beginning of a process which may take time… but our solution is the only economically, environmentally and socially viable one.