Why It’s So Hard to Get Rid of Used Mattresses

You’d think that when you “return” your Casper or Leesa mattress after the trial period that it finds a second life, maybe with a person in need, perhaps recycled into something else soft and squishy. But the sad truth is that most mattresses these days still end up in the landfill. Charities often won’t take them for fear of spreading bedbug infestations, recycling isn’t profitable enough to be common, and most states don’t have effective recycling programs in the first place.

I know this because I’ve had to get rid of 20 mattresses over the past two years after testing them for Wirecutter’s guide to online mattresses. Because the online mattress companies offer a trial period and having buyers ship a mattress back is impractical, they typically offer to work with buyers to donate their unwanted mattresses. But that doesn’t always work out. I’ve tried donating to more than a dozen local charities, and only recently have I found success, through an organization helping Hurricane Maria survivors in Buffalo, New York, where I live. (Ron Lieber documents his similar experiences in this piece for the The New York Times, parent company of Wirecutter.)

If the company can’t help and you want to avoid sending your mattress to a landfill, you can find a charity on your own (if you’re doing this with a mattress you’re “returning” to an online retailer, check to make sure they’ll reimburse you—they usually will). The Furniture Bank Association is a good starting point. Look specifically for organizations that shelter, resettle, and otherwise help people find new homes. (Using those kinds of keywords, plus your town/city, in a Web search is a good starting point.) If that fails (or your mattress is older or lightly stained, and not structurally damaged), you can simply ask on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever you have contacts and friends if anyone knows of a group or family in need. Some online mattress sellers will even accept this kind of donation as a valid return for your refund (check with the company first, of course).

What about recycling?

Ideally, recycling should provide an alternative to the junk heap, but whether you can easily recycle your old mattress (or even realistically do it at all) depends on where you live. The mattress-industry-funded Mattress Recycling Council maintains Bye Bye Mattress, a site that lets you find a recycling facility or drop-off point near you—but don’t be surprised if the closest spot is across the state, or in another state entirely.

Some states make it easier than others to recycle mattresses. Amanda Wall, marketing and communication manager for the MRC, said, “For [recycling] to work, it has to be a perfect storm: the price of the materials, the work to extract them, the [fee] to collect it, and the cost of getting it to the right place.” Thatʼs easier in places where the MRC administers mattress recycling programs. Currently thatʼs only the small states of Rhode Island and Connecticut and recycling-friendly California. The programs are funded by a $9 to $16 fee at point of purchase (even from an online vendor), enacted by legislation, that helps fund the drop-off sites, transport, and eventual recycling of mattresses. Rhode Island has 33 places to drop off a mattress, versus the one facility in all of upstate New York. Casper, Leesa, and Tuft & Needle reps all stated that recycling their mattresses was notably easier in these three states.

From 2015 to 2017, those three states recycled about 1 million mattresses (PDF). That’s an impressive 11 million cubic feet of landfill space saved, but it’s only 5 percent of the 20 million mattresses tossed out every year, by the MRC’s own estimate.

I happen to live close to Triad Recycling, north of Buffalo, the only recycling facility (as far as I could find), that takes mattresses in all of New York state, so I decided to visit to find out what’s involved in giving mattresses an eco-friendly end.

The problem, Triad president and founder John Hannon told me, is that getting mattresses to a recycler is not easy, and the profits in selling the recycled materials are anything but stable. Mattresses are expensive to transport and process in the first place. As foam mattresses become more popular, the profits could become even more of a problem, because the wood and steel used in traditional mattress construction is a lot more profitable to recycle than foam. Mattresses returned by online buyers during 100-night trial periods put more mattresses into the waste stream, and this stands to get worse as larger companies (like Mattress Firm) start copying the online-only companies’ direct-shipping, trial-period style. Hannon noted that what he gets for foam fluctuates by as much as 100 percent, such that foam recycling is sometimes barely profitable, depending on the price of oil and the demand from carpet manufacturers, who are the primary market. “Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes you’re begging them [carpet makers] to take it,” he said.

Turning a mattress into market-ready materials is no small task either. When mattresses arrive, workers at Triad, many from Buffalo’s burgeoning South Asian and African refugee community, break them into their components: foam, fabric, steel coils from traditional mattresses, and, in the case of older box springs, wood. Workers slice foam out of mattress covers with utility knives, “similar to filleting a fish,” Hannon explained. The freed foam then gets loaded into a baler for compacting, and then sold to carpet makers, who shred, grind, and recombine it for carpet padding underlay. Fabric doesn’t have much of a market; some is shredded and used in clean-up products for oil spills and the like, but the rest is either burned for energy or ends up in landfills. Traditional spring mattresses and box springs are more work to process than foam versions, but net more high-value materials. Steel coils are popped off wood frames with crowbars or the teeth of skid-steer loaders, then sold as scrap. Wood gets mulched for landscaping.

So although mattress recycling can be done, in most parts of the US (and even the towns right next to Triad Recycling), municipal waste handlers simply absorb the cost and annoyance of handling mattresses. And because these big slabs of foam, wood, and metal coils take up a lot of space, jam waste shredders, float to the top when compacted, and sometimes fall on workers, they usually end up in landfills. But waste companies don’t want to lose a bid because they add on the real cost of mattress handling. They’ll usually take them and throw them in landfills, Hannon said—although they’ll occasionally bring them to Triad, when feasible. This problem is perpetuated by politicians not wanting to charge residents a fee for putting a mattress on the curb, something they’re used to doing for free.

If you have any good suggestions for finding charities or organizations that need mattresses, let us know in the comments.