Narrator: 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 $2,600.
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 3 a.m. in Suchitepéquez, Guatemala.
Most of the country is asleep,
but this is when latex-tree tappers like Doroteo Blanco
start their day.
Narrator: There are over a million rubber trees
on the Guatelinda Plantation, where Doroteo works.
In the next four hours,
he'll extract latex sap from around 700 of them.
Narrator: Doroteo carves a careful spiral
in the bark of this tree, letting the sap drip out.
His technique is incredibly precise —
something he's honed over 20 years on the job.
Narrator: Then he waits.
Narrator: 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 car tires
but useless for mattresses.
During the summer low season,
an average of 140 liters of natural latex
slowly seep into Doroteo's buckets every morning.
Double that in winter.
Narrator: Everything the tappers collect
then goes straight to a nearby processing facility.
Factory workers consolidate the morning's haul 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.
Once the core sets,
workers wash, dry,
and squish the mattress cores 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 Klose's family has run Guatelinda
for over 50 years — only a decade longer
than the average rubber tree can be tapped.
Workers take care of Guatelinda's
2,000 acres of rubber trees.
Christian: We are certified FSC.
FSC stands for Forest Stewardship Council.
Basically, you have to have no child labor,
you have to only use organic products,
you have to abide the laws of your country,
and different things to certify that you're sustainable.
Narrator: The facilities are also GOLS,
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.
Christian: 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 a career low,
but I would say there are 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.
Narrator: It's times like these
that plantation workers are most at risk of exploitation,
which is what certifications like GOLS
attempt to incentivize companies not to do.
In 2021, the global latex-mattress market
was valued at $9.7 billion.
By 2030, that number could double
to around $20 billion.
But maintaining the high standards
that justify the mattress' 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'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.
Narrator: 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.
Narrator: Workers on unregulated plantations
can be exposed to harsh working conditions,
like 12-hour days, below-minimum wages, and toxic chemicals.
Because we're keen on getting premiums,
we are usually profitable.
So we can keep the jobs of our workers, we can keep tapping,
and we can keep adding value to our latex.