Hutchinson ? A new storage building at the Reno County landfill provides a resting place for discarded mattresses.

But it’s not a final resting place.

Hutchinson Correctional Facility staff haul the mattresses to the prison’s growing mattress recycling program. Inmates take apart the mattresses, and the springs, bedding and foam go to different recycling markets. The remaining wood is available for various construction projects at the prison.

“We have really kind of blossomed out there,” Hutchinson Correctional Facility public information officer Steve Schneider said of the program involving minimum custody unit inmates. Begun in the spring with three inmates, Schneider said, the program now provides jobs for nine inmates who have processed about 7,000 mattresses.

The county landfill invested about $3,000 for a new metal building, sitting on a concrete foundation south of the scale house.

When landfill staff spot a mattress in a vehicle pulling up to the scale house, they encourage the customer to unload it at the building, instead of dumping it in the municipal solid waste cell.

The building will hold about 50 to 60 mattresses, said county solid waste director Steve Graves. Mattresses have “a bad habit of sponging” in the landfill, and the springs can be “vicious,” said Graves, who welcomes the recycling option.

Landfill staff have tracked the number of mattresses hauled away since the building opened earlier this month. Landfill office manager Megan Davidson said more than 120 mattresses, weighing 3.43 tons, have been kept out of the landfill.

A mattress takes up about 23 cubic feet. Not only does recycling lengthen the life of an expensive lined cell, it saves the county’s expense stemming from the $1-per-ton fee it must pay the state, Davidson pointed out.