Why I Paid $95 to Recycle a Mattress – and Maybe You Too

I paid $95 to recycle a mattress.

It may sound strange, foolish even, to pay so much to throw away an everyday household item.

But the economics of mattress recycling illustrate why it can be difficult – and costly – to be an environmentally friendly consumer in the US.

Americans throw away According to the Mattress Recycling Council, approximately 15 to 20 million mattresses are produced annually. That’s an average of about 50,000 per day.

Most end up in a landfill, experts say.

Mattresses are “one of the hardest things to recycle,” says Alicia Marseille, a sustainability and circular economy expert at Arizona State University.

“It’s a huge waste stream,” she says.

My mattress – a queen-sized hand-me-down from family and probably almost twenty years old – was in dire need of replacing. The average mattress has a lifespan of approximately 14 years, from production to disposal by the consumer. according to to MRC.

But what should you do with it?

I live in Brooklyn, where residents have access to a mattress free as part of routine waste collection.

As someone who painstakingly tries to reduce the amount of waste in everyday life – avoiding single-use plastics, composting food scraps – it was painful to think that mine would languish in a landfill.

“If you throw your mattress in a landfill, it will probably stay there for hundreds of years,” says Meg Romero, superintendent of recycling and litter control for Charles County, Maryland.

I thought I could probably find a new home for that.

Wrong.

After two weeks of failed shipments to local homeless shelters, organizations like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and community forums like Don’t buy anything And The Freecycle NetworkI had exhausted my patience for a free giveaway option.

Individuals who donate a mattress to certain groups may be able to claim a tax deduction because of the fair market value on their federal tax return. Taxpayers would need to itemize their deductions to take advantage of this.

Have I neglected to reach out to some interested parties? Probably. Maybe someone else has different results? Yes. But my personal cost-benefit analysis dictated that it was time to forego donations.

I researched and selected a number of recycling options Renewable Recycling Inc.located in East Rockaway, New York. Few other U.S. companies do such work, experts say. A folder compiled by MRC contains only 55.

More than 75% of a mattress is recyclablesaid MRC. Some companies estimate it closer to 90%.

Recyclers strip them of materials such as wood, steel and various foams and fibers, and sell them on secondary markets.

The materials are then re-purposed: Shredded foam and fibers as carpet padding, pet beds or insulation; wood for mulch and fuel; and feathers as scrap, for example.

“If you can recycle, those materials get new life so they can be used for something else,” said Romero of Charles County. launched a mattress recycling program for residents on August 1.

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This reuse has other environmental benefits. For example, there is less need to extract or source new materials for production, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water and energy use, experts said.

Unusually, Charles County service is largely free to residents. They can take two items per day, such as a mattress and a box spring, to the Charles County Landfill for recycling for free. Additional items cost $10 each.

Residents recycled more than 900 mattresses in September, more than double officials’ estimates, Romero said. The county has contracted with a Baltimore-based company, Decorative solutionsto manage the process.

Charles County’s motivations were not purely environmental, however.

Mattresses are bulky and take up valuable real estate in the county landfill, Romero said.

“A landfill is a confined, finite space,” says Peter Conway, the president of Spring back Coloradoa recycler based in Commerce City. “They want to put things that break, things that are easy to compact.”

“Mattresses are kind of the antithesis of that,” Conway said. He expects to divert 8 million pounds of waste from Colorado landfills this year.

The $95 fee I ultimately paid to Renewable Recycling is “pretty standard” among mattress recyclers, Conway said.

The cost covered picking up the mattress from my Brooklyn apartment and transporting it to the company’s warehouse in Oceanside, New York. (I could have done that $55 saved by delivering the mattress myself, but I don’t have a car.)

Spring Back Colorado also charges $40 for each mattress and box spring a consumer delivers. If a consumer requests home pickup, there will be an additional fee of $60 or more depending on the distance of travel.

Mattresses are more difficult to recycle than other items such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans and cardboard, said Charles County’s Romero.

“They are all made completely differently,” Romero said. “There is no uniform construction and different types of materials are used to make one mattress.”

The process is more time and labor intensive, she said. Often workers have to break them down by hand.

For example, cotton scraps must be picked from steel mattress springs before they can be shredded or baled for sale to scrap markets. according to to the Mattress Recycling Council. Staples must also be removed from wooden frames before they go on the market, the report said. Each coil in a “pocket coil mattress” is individually wrapped in fabric and must be separated from each other, Romero said.

Moreover, mattress materials generate only “modest revenue” when sold, Reid Lifset, a researcher and resident fellow in industrial ecology at the Yale School of the Environment, wrote in an email.

These incomes often depend on fluctuating commodity prices.

“We don’t set the price for a ton of foam or steel,” Conway said. “One day we might get 18 cents a pound and the next week only 10 cents.”

There also has to be market demand for those raw materials – and sometimes those markets are not nearby, which increases shipping costs.

Spring Back Colorado, for example, sent all its foam and ticking to a recycling center in California, Conway said. It cost the company about $2,000 to ship each truckload.

About a year ago, that California partner stopped accepting shipments: demand for materials had dried up, Conway said. He called companies as far away as Mexico, Canada, India and Egypt to find an alternative placement, but ultimately found a new partner in Texas, he said.

“It’s pretty razor-thin margins we operate on,” Conway said.

Spring Back Colorado earns additional revenue from mattress pickup and drop-off, and from partnerships with businesses and municipalities, he said.

“Someone has to pay,” says Marseille of Arizona State University. “It usually falls to consumers.”

Some states and municipalities are making it more cost-effective for consumers to recycle their mattresses.

Charles County, Maryland, for example, funds its fledgling mattress program largely with taxpayer dollars. About $150 of residents’ taxes are allocated each year to the county’s Environmental Resources Department for services such as curbside recycling, yard waste removal, oil and antifreeze — and now mattress recycling, Romero said.

Three states – California, Connecticut and Rhode Island – have passed mattress recycling laws since 2013. A similar program in Oregon will start on January 1, 2025.

The laws require the mattress industry to develop and administer state programs to collect and recycle discarded mattresses free of charge.

However, the initiative is funded by consumers.

Individuals and institutions (such as hotels and dormitories) in such states pay a fee every time they purchase a mattress: $10.50 in California, $11.75 in Connecticut, $20.50 in Rhode Island, and $22.50 in Oregon, said Amanda Wall, a spokesperson for the Mattress Recycling Council. . MRC is a nonprofit organization created by the International Sleep Products Association, a mattress industry trade group, to create and implement these state programs.

Retailers forward these fees to MRC, which funds consumer recycling efforts. Ultimately, the fees will subsidize free mattress drop-off and recycling at any MRC-funded collection site in participating states, Wall said. (Recyclers can still charge for mattress pickup, she said.)

The mattress industry pushed for similar legislation this year in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia, and plans to continue working with these state lawmakers in 2025, Wall said.

The laws are an example of “extended producer responsibility“The policies that states have adopted more broadly force companies to take some responsibility for their products at end-of-life,” Marseille said.

Some wonder whether consumers are currently bearing too much of the burden.

“For the most part, companies are not making products that are easier to recycle,” Conway says. “It’s up to the consumer to figure out how to get rid of their stuff in a responsible manner.”

He believes it should be easier and more affordable for consumers to recycle to encourage that behavior.

“If you ultimately have two options, and one is to throw it in a hole in the ground and the other is to recycle it, 95% of people will choose that cheaper option,” Conway added.