Here's What Happens to Your Old, Unrecycled Mattress

Mattresses are big, and anyone who's had to carry one or two in their life knows that they're also a pain to move around. Because of this, it's no wonder that the old unwanted ones so often wind up being dumped off at the nearest convenient corner, lot, or alleyway. We've all seen them in places like these, stained and moldy, sitting there for who knows how long. This is just one of the destinies that old unrecycled mattresses meet, but there are others, and none of them are any good for the environment. Let's break down the details of this and why you should take the extra step of adequately getting rid of your old unwanted mattress and boxspring.

Who will accept my old mattress?

First of all, you can indeed easily recycle your old mattress in the correct way, even if you're in a hurry to get rid of it. Not every place has a mattress pickup service offering this as an option, but if you're anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area, you're good to go. Otherwise, the same companies you buy your new mattress are sometimes willing to take your old one off your hands for the sake of recycling. On the other hand, there are municipal recycling facilities, and in some cases, they accept old mattresses.

Despite these options, it's not always easy to get someone to take one of these clunky objects away. An average mattress contains about 23 square feet of various materials, including wood, metal, cotton, polyurethane foam, and plastic, but its size isn't so much the problem as the range of materials inside the product. Recyclers have to separate them all by type and recycle or dispose of each accordingly. This is why not any facility or company will readily accept a mattress.

With that said, a well-run recycling plant equipped to handle mattress bulk can make quick recycling work of most models. With modern separating machinery, a single mattress can be broken down into its component materials in just a few minutes by a single employee managing the machinery. Some services do sell recycled mattress materials to many customers.

In other words, while you might have to call around a bit depending on your location, the technology and services are available for avoiding a clandestine dump.

What happens to unrecycled mattresses, and why should I bother?

The simple reason why you should try to get your old mattress recycled is that it keeps those 23 cubic feet of various fabrication materials out of our already overloaded waste disposal and landfill channels, and even more importantly, out of the local natural landscape.

Mattresses are bulky things and quickly add to the volume of any landfill. Mattresses tossed off into alleyways, and empty fields get in the way even worse, and parts of them eventually find their way into waterways, among trees, and into the stomachs of animals, causing all kinds of harm.

The sad thing is that none of this is necessary at all. Despite the complexity of breaking a mattress into all of its different materials for segmented recycling, over 90% of a mattress can indeed be recycled. 

The cotton inside them can be used for new cloth, the springs and other metal parts can be melted down for new metal objects, and the wood can be shredded for pulp reuse. Even the massive amounts of polyurethane inside most mattresses are fully reusable in new ones or other products such as insulating materials and padding.

A final note

If you're located in the San Francisco Bay area, getting your mattress recycled is as easy as making a phone call, booking a pickup time, and waiting for the experts to come to take it away. For a modest fee, they can do this quickly and easily. Services like The Mattress Guy Co and others handle mattress removal for commercial and residential clients throughout the region, with professional and environmentally friendly results.