Camp Garbage Facilities Expecting 45 Tons of Memory Foam Bed Toppers

Lake Huron, PA (August 13, 2026) – Long time Camp Huron Lake Director Marty Feldstein remembers the days when campers showed up each summer with bedding consisting of two sets of sheets, a blanket and a pillow. Unfortunately, those days are long gone as campers can no longer “rough it” on a thin mattress supported by a plywood bed board over a flimsy metal frame. Feldstein believes that approximately 90% of his campers now use some variation of a memory foam bed topper or more traditional foam egg crates to enhance their sleeping experiences.

The American Camping Federation estimates that 45 tons of bed toppers will be thrown away at the end of the summer causing a massive overflow to camp, town and county trash facilities. Memory foam is made from viscoelastic polyurethane, a plastic polymer mixed with special chemical compounds and takes 50 years for a thin foam topper up to 1,000 years for a thick memory foam mattress to fully decompose in a landfill.

Because most parents of campers have a policy that if an item cannot be washed in a residential-sized washing machine, the item should simply be left at camp to be thrown away. “For fifty bucks, is it worth me schlepping this thing home? It smells mildewy and who knows what type of bodily fluids soaked through the sheets in the last seven weeks,” said Sherry Caplan, mother of a hormonal 13 year-old Huron Lake Inter boy. 

Some sanitation services refuse to haul off the mass amounts of bed toppers leaving camps with a surplus of memory foam. For Marty Feldstein this surplus is a great way to upgrade the camp at little to no cost. 

“We cut ‘em up and put them on the bleachers, dining room chairs, under the ropes course and on the music studio wall for soundproofing.  I even set up a little area away from everything where counselors can go at night for some wholesome evening activities,” noted Feldstein, unaware that his set up has hosted several adult staff orgies over the past few summers.