So many mattresses

"Why are there so many mattresses at the bins?" I regularly say to myself.

Well. I have worked out the stats. And here are the figures (I have taken the liberty of rounding the figures, so it's not totally exact)

You should replace your mattress every ten years. (it says so here; mind you it also says you should hoover your mattress, but the instructions with mine say you definitely shouldn't). I suppose some dirty people change it less often than that (bleugh) and some really dirty people may have to change it more frequently than that (bleugh), so it must even out to every 10 years on average.

There's about half a million people in Edinburgh (according to this, there's a bit less , but lets count all the transient people too).

So that means that every year 50,000 mattresses get thrown out. Which is (roughly) 1000 per week. Which means that Monday to Friday there are 200 mattresses chucked per day.

However I put it to you (now I sound like Petrocelli) that most people get new mattresses at the weekend so that means that most old mattresses (say 80%) are chucked out on a Saturday or Sunday. The remaining 20% (200) will be thrown out Monday to Friday (ie 40 per day).

So. On a Monday there must be approximately 840 mattresses that the cleansing department have to remove from our streets.

Where do they all go? That's a shit load of mattresses.


In other news, I got the number 11 today. Gawd there are some ugly people with noisy ringtones on that route.

And is this the last Xmas tree in the city do you think? Surely!