Getting rid of an old mattress is a painful and time-consuming process, but for Matt Althauser, it was a process that changed his life.

Althauser was living in Germany at the time. He decided to take a trip to a nearby dump and get rid of a mattress. But once he did, something felt wrong.

“When I dumped it I had this moment of guilt that this big piece of furniture was going into the landfill and taking up so much space,” he said.

So Althauser, a 2002 graduate of Bellevue High School, came back to the Seattle area to do something about it.

It’s been barely over a month, but Althauser’s business, Bed Be Gone, is already off the ground.

It’s a one-man operation where Althauser will come and pick up an old mattress and break it down, reuse the parts, and keep the discarded furniture out of the landfill.

He charges $50 for a mattress and box spring (and $15 for an additional part), or those interested can drive to his West Seattle warehouse in the Active Space building and drop off product for $20 a piece. Althauser is getting a few customers in the Seattle area, but he wants to expand out to the Eastside.

Althauser has derived a variety of uses for the materials he pulls out of the mattresses.

He’s using the metal springs to make wine racks. The wood is being recycled and turned into plywood, and he’s using the fabric covers to make decorative shopping bags.

“We’re essentially turning garbage or what would be waste into something people can use and is practical,” Althauser said.

Althauser, sporting his company’s logo T-shirt with the phrase “recycling is dreaming,” has always been interested in starting a green business. His influence from Germany, where the sustainable lifestyle is the norm, helped stoke the desires even more.

Althauser has studied the effect a decaying mattress has on a landfill, and it can cause difficulty if the area is tabbed for further development.

“If you just toss a mattress in a landfill it takes about 20 years to begin the decomposition process, so the strain on the landfill is high,” he said. “It creates pockets in the landfill. If you have these pockets that are decomposing at different time frames and you want to build on it, it makes the land unstable.”

Althauser is still trying to get his feet under him with the new business, but he is already building partnerships. He is working with Monroe Correctional Complex, which uses its inmates in a mattress recycling program, so he can add capacity. This way, he spends less time breaking down the mattress and more time building the crafts and getting out and about marketing his business.