Personal Finance
Why I paid $95 to recycle a mattress — and you might, too
The author paid a company, Renewable Recycling, to pick up and recycle his queen-size mattress in New York City.
Greg Iacurci
I paid $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 illustrate 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, according 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 things to recycle,” said Alicia Marseille, a sustainability and circular economy expert at Arizona State University.
“It’s a massive waste stream,” she said.
‘It’ll probably be there for hundreds of years’
Mattresses at a garbage dump.
Robert Brook | Corbis | Getty Images
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 about 14 years, from manufacture to consumer disposal, according to MRC.
But what to do with it?
I live in Brooklyn, where residents can dispose of a mattress for free as part of routine trash pickup.
As someone who meticulously tries to cut waste in everyday life — 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 probably be there for hundreds of years, just sitting there,” said Meg Romero, the recycling and litter control superintendent for Charles County, Maryland.
Surely, I can find a new home for it instead, I thought.
Wrong.
After two weeks of unsuccessful dispatches to local homeless shelters, organizations 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 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 return. Taxpayers would need to itemize their deductions to benefit.
Did I neglect to reach out to some interested parties? Probably. Might someone else have different results? Yes. But my personal cost-benefit analysis dictated that it was time to ditch donations.
I researched some recycling options, and selected Renewable Recycling Inc., based in East Rockaway, New York. There are few other U.S. companies that do such work, experts said. A directory compiled by MRC lists just 55.
How a mattress is recycled
Mattresses are picked up and placed into a truck to be hauled to a recycling facility at the Prima Deshecha landfill in San Juan Capistrano, California, on March 10, 2022.
Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
More than 75% of a mattress is recyclable, according to MRC. Some companies put it at closer to 90%.
Recyclers strip them of materials like wood, steel, and various foams and fibers, and sell them into secondary markets.
The materials are then re-purposed: Shredded foam and fibers as carpet padding, animal beds or insulation; wood as mulch and fuel; 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 example, there’s a reduced need to extract or source new materials for manufacturing, which cuts greenhouse gas emissions and water and energy use, experts said.
Unusually, the Charles County service is largely free for residents. They can bring two items a day — like a mattress and box spring — to the Charles County Landfill for recycling for no charge. Additional items cost $10 per piece.
Residents recycled more than 900 mattresses in September, over double officials’ estimates, Romero said. The county contracts with a Baltimore-based company, Deco Solutions, to manage the process.
Charles County’s motivations weren’t purely environmental, though.
Mattresses are bulky, taking up precious real estate in the county landfill, Romero said.
“A landfill is a limited, finite space,” said Peter Conway, the president of Spring Back Colorado, a recycler based in Commerce City. “They want to put things that break down, things that are easily compactible.”
“Mattresses are kind of the antithesis of that,” Conway said. He expects to divert 8 million pounds of waste from Colorado landfills this year.
Why mattress recycling can be expensive
Shredded old mattress materials.
Guillaume Souvant | Afp | Getty Images
The $95 fee I ultimately paid to Renewable Recycling is “pretty standard” among mattress recyclers, Conway said.
The expense covered mattress pickup from my Brooklyn apartment and transport to the company’s warehouse in Oceanside, New York. (I could have saved $55 by dropping off the mattress myself, but I don’t own a car.)
Spring Back Colorado also charges $40 for each mattress and box spring that a consumer drops off. An additional fee of $60 or more applies, depending on the travel distance, if a consumer asks for home pickup.
Mattresses are harder to recycle than other items like plastic bottles, aluminum cans and cardboard, said Romero, of Charles County.
“They’re all made completely differently,” Romero said. “There’s no uniform construction, and there are several different types of materials used to make one mattress.”
The process is more time- and labor-intensive, she said. Often, workers must break them down by hand.
For example, cotton remnants must be picked off steel mattress springs before it can be shredded or baled for sale to scrap markets, according to the Mattress Recycling Council. Staples also need to be removed from wood frames before going to market, it said. Each coil in a “pocket coil mattress” is individually wrapped in fabric and must be separated, Romero said.
‘Razor-thin margins’
Additionally, mattress materials yield only “modest revenues” when sold, Reid Lifset, a research scholar and resident fellow in industrial ecology at Yale School of the Environment, wrote in an e-mail.
Those revenues 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 get 10 cents.”
If you put your mattress in a landfill, it’ll probably be there for hundreds of years, just sitting there.
Meg Romero
recycling and litter control superintendent for Charles County, Maryland
There must also be a market demand for those commodities — and sometimes those markets aren’t nearby, adding to shipping costs.
For example, Spring Back Colorado used to send all its foam and ticking to a recycling center in California, Conway said. It cost the company about $2,000 to ship each truck load.
About a year ago, that California partner stopped accepting shipments: Demand had dried up for material, Conway said. He called companies as far afield as Mexico, Canada, India and Egypt to find 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 pickups and drop-offs, and from partnerships with businesses and municipalities, he said.
“Someone has to pay,” said Marseille, of Arizona State University. “It usually falls to consumers.”
Consumer fees subsidize recycling efforts
Kosamtu | E+ | Getty Images
Some states and municipalities are making it more cost-effective for consumers to recycle their mattresses.
For example, Charles County, Maryland, funds its fledgling mattress program largely with taxpayer money. About $150 of residents’ taxes are allocated to the county’s Environmental Resources division each year, for services like curbside recycling, disposal of yard waste, oil and anti freeze — and now mattress recycling, Romero said.
Three states — California, Connecticut and Rhode Island — have enacted mattress recycling laws since 2013. A similar program in Oregon is launching Jan. 1, 2025.
The 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, though.
Someone has to pay. It usually falls to consumers.
Alicia Marseille
sustainability and circular economy expert at Arizona State University
Individuals and institutions (like hotels and dormitories) in such states pay a fee each time they buy 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 created by the International Sleep Products Association, a mattress industry trade group, to build and run these state programs.
Retailers forward those fees to MRC, which funds the consumer recycling efforts. Ultimately, the fees subsidize free mattress drop-off and recycling at any MRC-funded collection site in participating states, Wall said. (Recyclers can still charge a fee for mattress pickup, she said.)
The mattress industry has pushed for similar legislation in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia this year, and plans to keep working with these state legislatures in 2025, Wall said.
The laws are an example of “extended producer responsibility” policies states have adopted more broadly, forcing companies to bear some end-of-life responsibility for their products, said Marseille.
Some question whether consumers shoulder too much of the burden right now.
“Companies aren’t making, for the most part, more easy-to-recycle products,” Conway said. “It’s on the consumer to figure out how to responsibly get rid of their items in a conscious way.”
He thinks it needs to be easier and more affordable for consumers to recycle to promote that behavior.
“At the end of the day, if you have two options, and one is throw it in a hole in the ground, and the other is recycle it, 95% of the people will go with that cheaper option,” Conway added.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are shown on screen during a debate watch party at the Cameo Art House Theatre in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Sept. 10, 2024.
Allison Joyce | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With the Social Security Administration facing a looming funding crisis over the next decade, it’s clear that the next U.S. president — either Democratic candidate Kamala Harris or Republican candidate Donald Trump — is poised to inherit a Social Security dilemma.
Almost 68 million Americans receive Social Security payments every month. The benefits support seniors in their retirement, disabled Americans and survivors of beneficiaries, but the future of the Social Security Administration has been in jeopardy for years.
More than 11,200 Americans are now turning 65 every day. As more retirees start to claim Social Security, there are not enough workers contributing to the program to make up for that increase in benefit payments.
When such a shortfall happens, Social Security turns to its trust funds — money that is set aside to help pay for benefits and other administrative costs.
But the trust fund Social Security relies on to pay retirement benefits is projected to be depleted in 2033. At that time, just 79% of benefits may be payable, according to the program’s trustees.
The average retired worker would see about a $403 cut to their current average monthly benefit of $1,920.
Most Americans rank Social Security as “one of the top” or a “very important” issue that will help determine how they vote in November, a recent CNBC poll found.
Both presidential candidates — former president Trump and Vice President Harris — have vowed to protect Social Security benefits.
But restoring the program’s solvency will require changes — benefit cuts, tax increases or a combination of both. Yet some experts say the candidates’ discussions have thus far avoided specific details on how to address that shortfall.
“We’re not seeing anyone step up and say, ‘In nine years, our main retirement program is looking at the trust of being insolvent, and that could lead to roughly a 20% benefit cut across the board of everybody,” said Jason Fichtner, chief economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center and executive director of the Alliance for Lifetime Income’s Retirement Income Institute.
Trump promises no taxes on Social Security benefits
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Coachella, California, U.S., October 12, 2024.
Mike Blake | Reuters
On the campaign trail, Trump has touted an idea aimed at letting retirees keep more of their Social Security checks — ending taxes on benefits.
“Seniors should not pay tax on Social Security,” Trump wrote on July 31 in all capital letters on social media platform Truth Social.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found 85% of voters support the idea.
Currently, retirees pay federal income taxes on up to 85% of their benefits, depending on their incomes.
Just how much taxes retirees pay on benefits is based on a formula called combined income, the sum of adjusted gross income, nontaxable interest and half of Social Security benefits.
Married couples may pay taxes on up to 50% of their benefits if their combined incomes are between $32,000 and $44,000. If their incomes are over $44,000, up to 85% of their benefits may be taxable.
Individuals may be liable for taxes on up to 50% of their benefits if their incomes are between $25,000 and $34,000. If they have more than $34,000 in income, up to 85% of their benefits are taxable.
Because those thresholds do not change from year to year, more beneficiaries are paying taxes on their benefit income over time.
Ending taxes on Social Security benefits would move the insolvency date of Social Security’s trust fund closer by over one year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
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And it may not make a big difference in retirees’ budgets, according to Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The median household income for retirees is about $50,000, so the “vast majority” pay very little or nothing in taxes on their Social Security benefits, Gleckman said.
Exempting taxes on benefits would mostly help those with incomes between $63,000 and $200,000, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s research found.
But while the top 20% of households would see an average tax cut of about $1,400 after the elimination of the taxes on Social Security benefits, Gleckman explained, they would see an average tax increase of $6,500 with Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on imports.
“The net effect of what Trump is trying to do, if you look at everything including the tariffs, is probably increased taxes on retirees, even if they do get some benefit from repealing the tax on Social Security benefits,” Gleckman said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Harris wants ‘wealthiest Americans’ to ‘pay their fair share’
Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris looks on as she participates a “town hall” with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., October 15, 2024.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Harris campaign’s economic plan promises to “shore up Social Security and Medicare so that these essential programs will stay solvent in the long run by making corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share in taxes.”
In budget proposals and during the State of the Union, President Joe Biden has likewise called for having high earners pay more into the program.
More specific details on how Democratic candidate Harris would restore solvency to the program as president were not available by press time.
Employers and employees each pay 6.2% of wages to Social Security up to a taxable maximum (self-employed individuals pay 12.4%). In 2024, the limit on earnings that are subject to the Social Security payroll tax is $168,600. Top earners with $1 million in gross annual wage income stopped paying into the program as of March 2, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Washington Democrats have proposed reapplying those taxes for earnings over $400,000 or $250,000 in separate proposals, while also potentially raising taxes on investment income. Those tax increases would improve the program’s solvency, while also making certain benefit increases possible, per the proposals.
If Harris holds to the $400,000 threshold set by the Biden administration, her Social Security proposal would have “no impact on the vast majority of households,” according to Gleckman, since around 95% to 98% of households make that amount or less.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to lower costs and will always protect and strengthen Social Security and Medicare,” campaign spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.
Older Americans may feel effects of reform
As Social Security’s depletion dates get closer, any reform changes would need to phase in more quickly.
And people ages 55 and over — who are typically left out of Social Security reform proposals such as raising the retirement age — may also feel the effects of any changes, according to Fichtner.
“You don’t have a lot of time to change your retirement trajectory once you hit 55,” Fichtner said. “But now that we’re getting so close to trust fund depletion … and the magnitude is so large, I’m not sure we can actually afford from a financial standpoint to hold them harmless.”
Regardless of who is elected, it remains to be seen how much a new president can accomplish on Social Security.
With 60 votes required in the Senate to pass Social Security reform, both parties would have to agree.
Experts say it is possible lawmakers may wait until the last minute to address the issue.
“As you get closer and closer to the insolvency date, it means the benefit reductions have to be steeper and quicker, and it means the tax increases have to be more significant and faster,” Gleckman said. “So it makes it even harder.”
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