Hutchinson ? Inmates at Hutchinson Correctional Facility are fueling a new recycling effort at the prison that no other agency or business in the state is doing: They’re recycling mattresses.

“This is unique in the state of Kansas today,” Warden Sam Cline said. “Nobody dismantles mattresses or box springs.”

On a recent afternoon, Cline watched as three minimum-custody inmates cut apart old mattresses and pulled out the springs.

Mattresses average 23 cubic feet of space in landfills, Cline said. “By dismantling mattresses, we can preserve space in the landfill,” he said.

The steel from the springs is of salvage value, he said, and a North Carolina company wants to reuse the polyurethane foam from the mattresses as carpet padding. The wood from the mattresses is a good construction material and will be used at the prison, he said.

“The key thing is, it does have value and can be reused,” Cline said. “It’s not enough (money) to afford to do it privately, but this is a good job for those who can’t leave the premises and it benefits the environment.”

Salvaging mattresses is just the latest recycling effort at the prison, where inmates already recycle paper, plastic and metal from the prison’s trash; fashion prison blues into quilts; and use recycled wood to make children’s toys.

The Hutchinson Correctional Facility was recognized twice last year by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment for being the No. 1 “Green Team” among 157 state agencies, Cline said.

“Our goal was to reduce our landfill input by one-half,” he said of the prison’s Green Team efforts. “We exceeded that in the first three months of the program, and I thought it would take a year.”

In 2008, the Hutchinson Correctional Facility Green Team recycled 49,640 pounds of cardboard and paperboard, 4,800 pounds of paper, 34,145 pounds of steel and 252 pounds of other materials, according to the Kansas Green Teams website.

The new effort at the prison to recycle mattresses is a “program in its infancy,” Cline said, as only three inmates have started on the work. Already, New Beginnings, which provides housing in Hutchinson to displaced citizens, has donated 40 mattresses to the prison. Prison officials are in talks with Rice County to get mattresses from trash collections, and Harvey and McPherson counties have also expressed interest, Cline said.

A truck from the prison will pick up mattresses from the landfills, Cline said, noting the prison doesn’t want to deal directly with the public to get mattresses. He said it costs about $5 in excavation fees for a mattress to be at a landfill, so giving the mattresses to the prison could potentially save a county thousands of dollars.

“That’s not including sofas and recliners, which is another phase we’d like to get into,” Cline said.

As Cline watched the three inmates dismantle a mattress at the prison, he noted the inmates “can take one of these things apart in three minutes.” One inmate said they’d taken apart 15 in just over an hour, and Cline estimated 100 could be dismantled each day if there were six inmates.

“Imagine how many years this would take to decompose,” Cline said after helping an inmate carry a mattress to a table. “We just saved the taxpayers of Reno County five bucks by not putting this into the landfill.”