Natural Latex Mattress: All About It
There’s a difference between natural latex mattress and synthetic latex. Not only is one natural and one man made, but it is usually not too hard to tell the difference when it comes to a natural latex mattress vs. a synthetic latex mattress. To give some background on the subject, latex comes from a rubber tree. It’s the sap that gets tapped out of the rubber tree that is formed into a mattress. These mattresses from the natural latex have thousands of tiny pinhole openings where they “breathe”. This makes for a very comfortable mattress, because kind of like memory foam, the natural latex mattress conforms to the shape of a person’s body, and when the pressure is realeased by the person arising from the bed, the natural latex mattress is very quick to come back to its original shape.
Synthetic latex is okay to reproduce some of the properties that the natural latex mattress has, but it just isn’t the same. Synthetic latex is made from petrochemicals, and can cause allergies to the respiratory system and to the skin. Synthetic latex mattress ends up basically being a pollutant to the environment. The natural latex mattress with all of its tiny pinholes is very durable and sleeps very cool, whereas with the synthetic it has the tendency to sag, and it is just a copy and a fake.
Natural latex is used for a lot of materials. You may or may not have known that latex mattress is used to make balloons, gloves, condoms, swim caps, and a number of other products. Things that are natural biodegrade quite easily and are environmentally-friendly. Other materials like plastic could sit for thousands of years in a landfill and not biodegrade at all. It sometimes just depends how green you want to be whether you buy a natural product like something that is constructed from natural latex, or you buy something that is man made. In many cases natural products are more expensive, but when it comes right down to it, they actually may be less expensive in the long run because of their durability and tendency not to wear out as fast as some synthetic materials.
Natural latex is pretty cool stuff, although it is quite labor intensive to get the sap out of the trees. It takes about 2,500 hundred of the rubber trees to get enough of the natural latex mattress out to make the core of a queen-size natural latex mattress. Each of the rubber trees will give about a gallon, and it takes about six hours to get that gallon! Long live the natural latex.
