Why I paid $95 to recycle a mattress — and you might, too

I requited $95 to recycle a mattress.

It may sound odd, silly even, to pay so much to dispose of a run-of-the-mill household item.

But the economics of mattress recycling picture why it can be difficult — and costly — to be an eco-friendly consumer in the U.S.

Americans discard about 15 million to 20 million mattresses each year, concording to the Mattress Recycling Council. That’s an average of about 50,000 per day.

Most end up in a landfill, experts said.

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

“It’s a massive wilds stream,” she said.

My mattress — a queen-sized hand-me-down from family and probably close to two decades old — was in desperate need of replacement. The average mattress has a lifespan of nigh 14 years, from manufacture to consumer disposal, according to MRC.

But what to do with it?

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

As someone who meticulously tries to cut waste in everyday pep — avoiding single-use plastics, composting food scraps — it was painful to think of mine wasting away in a landfill.

“If you put your mattress in a landfill, it’ll all things considered be there for hundreds of years, just sitting there,” said Meg Romero, the recycling and litter control superintendent for Charles County, Maryland.

Unswervingly, I can find a new home for it instead, I thought.

Wrong.

After two weeks of unsuccessful dispatches to local homeless shelters, compositions like The Salvation Army and Goodwill, and community forums like Buy Nothing and The Freecycle Network, I’d exhausted my patience for a free-giveaway election.

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 recrudescence. Taxpayers would need to itemize their deductions to benefit.

Did I neglect to reach out to some interested parties? As likely as not. Might someone else have different results? Yes. But my personal cost-benefit analysis dictated that it was time to ditch provisions.

I researched some recycling options, and selected Renewable Recycling Inc., based in East Rockaway, New York. There are few other U.S. players that do such work, experts said. A directory compiled by MRC lists just 55.

More than 75% of a mattress is recyclable, according to MRC. Some enterprises put it at closer to 90%.

Recyclers strip them of materials like wood, steel, and various foams and fibers, and sell them into derivative markets.

The materials are then re-purposed: Shredded foam and fibers as carpet padding, animal beds or insulation; wood as mulch and sustenance; and springs as scrap steel, for example.

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

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That re-use has other environmental benefits. For model, there’s a reduced need to extract or source new materials for manufacturing, which cuts greenhouse gas emissions and water and intensity use, experts said.

Unusually, the Charles County service is largely free for residents. They can bring two items a day — identical to a mattress and box spring — to the Charles County Landfill for recycling for no charge. Additional items cost $10 per piece.

Districts recycled more than 900 mattresses in September, over double officials’ estimates, Romero said. The county wrinkles with a Baltimore-based company, Deco Solutions, to manage the process.

Charles County’s motivations weren’t purely environmental, all the same.

Mattresses are bulky, taking up precious real estate in the county landfill, Romero said.

“A landfill is a limited, limited space,” said Peter Conway, the president of Spring Back Colorado, a recycler based in Commerce City. “They covet to put things that break down, things that are easily compactible.”

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

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

The expense covered mattress pickup from my Brooklyn apartment and entrance to the company’s warehouse in Oceanside, New York. (I could have