I'm sure the mattress markup is astronomical, and I'm sure most brands come from the same factories.
What I like about IKEA is that you just walk in and self-serve yourself a mattress. No sales. No marketing. If you don't like it, at least it was cheap. So I'm giving them a recommend.
it's actually better than that. you can return it any time in the first year of ownership, provided you kept the receipt.
In all three of those countries, Ikea sells mattresses in the regular local sizes. I recall that, maybe 20 years ago, Ikea in the UK only sold beds and mattresses in their native (Swedish? Euro?) sizes. But, in the last few years, I've bought both beds and mattresses from Ikea that are standard UK and standard US sizes.
Of course, it's always good to double check the actual measurements of your old/new mattress before pulling the trigger.
Don't think I'd buy a used mattress either though...
but even if you do acknowledge this, it's not nearly as bad to sleep in a "dirty" bed for a few nights as it would be to own one and use it every night.
The funny thing to me was the she stayed in high end hotels pretty exclusively who I think you can at least be taking a fairly aggressive kill-it-with-bleach approach to laundry. I wondered if there was a wallmart version aimed at people who stay in seedy motels where it would seem to be more practical.
That said, as someone who travels a lot, when I look at travelers' catalogs like Magellan at a lot of the safety, germ protection, etc. items, part of me thinks that people who buy all that stuff are probably better off just not traveling.
By description the thing she had was much smaller & more form fitting than above link. One of the "selling points" was how small it packed into carry-on, for example.
The thing with silk is it's pretty fragile but it's probably the thinnest/lightest material that you'd actually want next to your skin.
They are made to go into sleeping bags, and I love mine for that use case (less sweat and dirt in your down bag), but I have also used them in dirt cheap hostels.
In one seedy hotel in Italy several people in my party had a lot of bedbug bites, but I can't say for sure if it actually protected me. I expect I was probably just lucky that there were none in my room.
Still, it's a little over 100 grams (less than 4 ounces) and it makes dirty mattresses in shitty hostels bearable.
There's a great "Adam Ruins Everything" episode about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tZOKfCial4
FWIW, I absolutely love my mattress in a box and the buying process was painless.
Don't be fooled if you thought the traditional mattress buying experience was sleazy (similar to a car buying experience), the mattress in a box online dark patterns take sleaze to a whole other level.
I have to say my experience was very good in that regard, possibly because I went with the most respected brand in my country (Canada) and the industry is much less crowded/competitive here.
Having said that, I bought the mattress over 2 years ago now so maybe things have changed. I hate dark patterns with a fiery passion.
I really doubt a bed wrapped in some form of cloth is any worse.
Unless you live on mars you are most likely getting ten times more pollution/plastic from other areas then your foam mattress.
That said, whether latex, polyurethane, or whatever, with foam mattresses you're supposed to use a mattress protector to prevent sweat and accidents from soiling the foam. Alternatively or in addition to that, Sleep on Latex uses a wool topper, as I'm sure many other brands do. And then on top of that most people use sheets. I would think all of that covering would trap any particles so they can conveniently be washed out to sea with all the other microplastics from the laundry.
I'd like to see some high quality research on this using realistic test environments, or even monitoring in actual bedrooms. I don't know who is willing to fund that though.