Why I paid $95 to recycle a mattress — and you might as well

I paid $95 to recycle a mattress.

It may seem strange, even ridiculous, to pay that much to get rid of an ordinary household item.

But the economics of mattress recycling show why it can be difficult — and expensive — to be a green consumer in the United States.

Americans throw away about 15 to 20 million mattresses each year, according to the Mattress Recycling Council. That is, an average of about 50,000 per day.

Experts say most of them end up in landfill.

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

“It's a huge waste stream,” she said.

My mattress—a queen-sized mattress that had been handed down from family and was probably nearly two decades old—was in desperate need of replacement. The average lifespan of a mattress is about 14 years, from manufacturing to disposal by the consumer, according to MRC.

But what do you do with it?

I live in Brooklyn, where residents can dispose of a mattress for free as part of their routine trash pickup.

As someone who meticulously tries to limit waste in everyday life — avoiding single-use plastics, composting food scraps — it was painful to think about wasting what I had in a landfill.

“If you put your mattress in a landfill, it's probably going to be there for hundreds of years, and it's going to stay there,” said Meg Romero, supervisor of recycling and litter control in Charles County, Maryland.

I thought surely I could find a new home for him instead.

mistake.

After two weeks of unsuccessful submissions to local homeless shelters, organizations like The Salvation Army and Goodwill, and community forums like Buy Nothing and The Freecycle Network, I ran out of patience for the giveaway option.

Individuals who donate a mattress to certain groups may be able to claim a tax deduction for its fair market value on their federal tax returns. Taxpayers will need to itemize their deductions to benefit.

Have you neglected to communicate with some interested parties? probably. Could someone else get different results? Yes. But my personal cost-benefit analysis dictated that it was time to give up on donations.

I looked into some recycling options and chose Renewable Recycling Inc., based in East Rockaway, New York. Experts said that there are few other American companies that do such work. The guide compiled by the MRC lists only 55.

More than 75% of mattresses are recyclable, according to MRC. Some companies put it at closer to 90%.

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

The materials: foam and shredded fibers are then reused as carpet padding, animal beds or insulation; Wood as mulch and fuel. Springs are like scrap steel, for example.

“If you can recycle, it will give these materials another life to use as something else,” said Romero of Charles County, which launched a mattress recycling program for residents on Aug. 1.

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

Unusually, Charles County's service is largely free to residents. They can bring two items a day — such as a mattress and box spring — to the Charles County landfill for free recycling. Additional items cost $10 each.

Romero said residents recycled more than 900 mattresses in September, more than double officials' estimates. The county contracts with Deco Solutions, based in Baltimore, to manage the operation.

But Charles County's motivations were not purely environmental.

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

“A landfill is a finite, limited space,” said Peter Conway, president of Springback Colorado, a recycling company based in Commerce City. “They want to put in things that break, and things that can be compressed easily.”

“Mattresses are kind of the opposite of that,” Conway said. 8 million pounds of waste is expected to be diverted from Colorado landfills this year.

The $95 fee she eventually paid to the renewable recycler is “pretty standard” among mattress recyclers, Conway said.

The expenses covered moving the mattress from my apartment in Brooklyn and transporting it to the company's warehouse in Oceanside, New York. (I could have saved $55 by leaving the mattress myself, but I don't have a car.)

Spring Back Colorado also charges $40 per mattress and box spring dropped off by the consumer. An additional fee of $60 or more applies, depending on travel distance, if the consumer requests home pickup.

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

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

This process is more time-consuming and labor-intensive, she said. Often, workers must break them by hand.

For example, cotton scraps from steel mattress springs must be picked up before they can be shredded or collected for sale in scrap markets, according to the Mattress Recycling Council. She added that staples should also be removed from wooden frames before putting them on the market. Each coil in the “pocket coil mattress” is individually wrapped in fabric and must be separated, Romero said.

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

These revenues often depend on fluctuating commodity prices.

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

There must also be market demand for those goods – and sometimes those markets are not nearby, which increases shipping costs.

For example, Spring Back Colorado used to send all of its foam and chips to a recycling center in California, Conway said. It cost the company about $2,000 to ship each truckload.

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

“It's very thin margins that we're working on,” Conway said.

Spring Back Colorado generates additional revenue from mattress pickups and deliveries, and from partnerships with businesses and municipalities, he said.

“Someone has to pay,” ASU's Marseille said. “It usually falls on the consumers.”

Some states and municipalities are working to make recycling their mattresses more cost effective for consumers.

For example, Charles County, Maryland, funds its startup mattress program largely with taxpayer money. About $150 in residents' taxes is allocated to the county's Department of Environmental Resources each year, Romero said, for services like curbside recycling, yard waste disposal, oil and antifreeze — and now mattress recycling.

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

Laws require the mattress industry to develop and administer state programs to collect and recycle discarded mattresses for free.

The initiative is funded by consumers.

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

Retailers send these fees to the MRC, which funds the consumer's recycling efforts. Wall said the fees ultimately support free mattress drop-off and recycling at any MRC-funded collection site in participating states. (Recyclers can still charge a fee to pick up the mattress, she said.)

The mattress industry pushed for similar legislation in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia this year, and plans to continue working with those states' legislatures in 2025, Wall said.

The laws are an example of “extended producer responsibility” policies that states have adopted more widely, forcing companies to bear some responsibility for the end-of-life of their products, Marseille said.

Some wonder if consumers are bearing too much of the burden right now.

“Companies, for the most part, are not making products that are easier to recycle,” Conway said. “It is the responsibility of the consumer to know how to responsibly dispose of their items in a conscious manner.”

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

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