Why Natural Latex Mattresses Are So Expensive | So Expensive | Insider Business

[Music] this gooey white foam is about to become the core of one of the most expensive mattresses you can buy it's made from natural latex harvested by hand from rubber trees in Guatemala unlike memory foam natural latex cores are hypoallergenic biodegradable and longer lasting but those features come with a high price tag a king-size mattress made with one of these cores can cost twenty six hundred

dollars a memory foam mattress of the same size costs less than half that so how does tree sap become a bed and what makes these mattresses so expensive he wakes at 3am in suchita pequez Guatemala most of the country is asleep but this is when latex tree tappers at Toro Deo Blanco start their day Escalade there are over a million rubber trees on the guateelinda plantation

where doroteo works in the next four hours he'll extract latex sap from around 700 of them is consume is [Music] a careful spiral in the bulk of this tray letting the sap drip out his technique is incredibly precise something he's honed over 20 years on the job [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign but judging how long that break should be is a balancing act if he collects

the liquid latex too late it may congeal into less valuable crumb rubber a material good for things like cartos but useless for mattresses [Music] during the summer low season an average of 140 liters of natural latex slowly seep into doroteos buckets every morning double that in winter is a [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] Factory workers consolidate the mornings Hall into tanks they let it sit for 12

hours before processing it in a centrifuge to separate the rubber from the water then they wait another 45 days for this concentrated latex to stabilize this will be turned into foam through a method called the Dunlop process it's based on a 19th century process for turning liquid latex into foam and is the most energy efficient method it involves first mixing the liquid latex with a combination

of stabilizers this concoction is then whipped up into foam in this machine until it's the preferred density then workers add a gelling agent and heat the foam with radio waves to harden or vulcanize the latex every week about 40 tons of liquid latex foam moves from the processing facility to the mattress core Factory they need about 50 kilos of liquid latex to make one 30 kilo

mattress [Music] once the core sets workers wash dry and squish the mattress course for Packaging this Factory produces around 600 mattresses per week these particular cores will be shipped to a facility in Los Angeles where they'll be processed into the final mattresses and sold by the company avocado this core Factory centrifuge facility and Plantation are all part of Grupo Fortaleza a group dedicated to the sustainable

production of liquid latex in southern Guatemala Christian closes family has runguate Linda for over 50 years only a decade longer than the average rubber tree can be tabbed workers take care of guadelinda's 2 000 Acres of rubber trees we are certified FSC FSC stands for Forest stewards ship Council basically you have to have no child labor you have to only use organic products you have to

abide the loss of your country and different things to certify that you're sustainable the facilities are also goals or Global organic latex standard certified products that carry the label must be made from 95 or more certified organic latex these certifications add value to the final product and consequently zeros to the price tag the rise of the Auto industry in the early 1900s caused the demand for

rubber to explode and plantations to pop up in places like southeast Asia and Central and South America but a rapid increase in production quickly led to Falling prices which often came at the expense of indigenous populations forced to work these forests sometimes at the threat of violence since then the World Market for natural rubber has fluctuated greatly usually moving in tandem with the demand for automobiles

in 2010 the price was very high so a lot of people started planting rubbers started buying a lot of land and started acquiring a lot of debt in the last 10 years it's been fluctuating and right now it's not at carrier low but I would say they're very low prices right now because of all the war in Russia and Ukraine and all the sanctions being put

in China and the lack of production in China as well it has reduced the commodity price of natural rubber it's Times Like These that Plantation workers are most at risk of exploitation which is what certifications like goals attempts to incentivize companies not to do in 2021 the global latex mattress Market was valued at 9.7 billion dollars by 2030 that number could double to around 20 billion

dollars but maintaining the high standards that justify the mattress's final price tag isn't easy in our history of planting trees we've been through two or three hurricanes when there's too much rain you can't really Harvest anything you cannot tap because all the sap that that's coming out of the tree it turns to wash off second thing it destroys roads so you can't really transport anything and

third well people suffer a lot when the rivers tend to grow and they cannot go to work because everything is flooded the opposite can also be devastating if there is drought if it's too dry the rubber trees cannot produce enough latex for us to tap workers on unregulated plantations can be exposed to harsh working conditions like 12-hour days below minimum wages and toxic chemicals because we're