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How We Recycle Your Mattress

Since 2011, we've recycled over 1.15 million mattresses — and we've learned exactly what happens inside them. Here's the complete process, from the moment we pick up your mattress to when its materials get a second life.

1.15M+ Mattresses Recycled
90% Material Recovery
30K+ Tons Recovered
Since 2011 Years of Experience
A Bedder World mattress recycling facility
1

Pickup and Transport

When our team arrives at your home, we carefully remove your mattress and load it into our truck. We handle everything — you don't need to drag it outside or prep it in any way. We'll navigate stairs, tight hallways, whatever your space requires.

From there, your mattress heads to our nearest staging warehouse. We operate facilities across the country to minimize transport distance and get mattresses into the recycling stream quickly.

Team picking up mattress from customer home
2

Sorting and Assessment

At the staging warehouse, every mattress gets evaluated. We're looking at condition, age, and materials to determine the best path forward:

Donation (select mattresses)

Mattresses that are less than five years old, free of stains, and still supportive can go to our donation partners. We work with Habitat for Humanity, Salvation Army, Goodwill, churches, and homeless shelters across the country. A mattress with life left in it shouldn't go to a landfill if someone needs it.

Recycling (90%+ of mattresses)

The vast majority of mattresses we collect go through our full recycling process. Even older mattresses contain valuable materials worth recovering.

Disposal (about 5%)

Some mattresses are too soiled, moldy, or contaminated with hazardous materials to recycle safely. These are the only ones we send to disposal — and we work hard to keep this number as low as possible.

3

Manual Deconstruction

This is where the real work happens. Mattress recycling isn't automated — it requires skilled hands.

A trained recycler starts by cutting the fabric cover around the edges with a utility knife. Any hogties (the metal clips holding the mattress together) get snipped. Then the cover comes off, revealing the layers inside.

Every mattress is different. Some have three inches of foam. Some have twelve. Some have innersprings, some are all-foam, some have latex layers or gel memory foam. Our team separates each layer by hand, sorting materials into their proper streams.

Worker cutting mattress cover Worker separating foam layers
4

Material Separation

Mattress materials being separated

Once deconstructed, materials get sorted into dedicated piles:

Foam

Gets stacked and prepared for baling. This is usually the bulkiest material — a single mattress can contain 20+ pounds of foam.

Metal Springs

Are separated and stacked. The steel in mattress coils is valuable and infinitely recyclable.

Wood

From box springs gets broken down and stacked separately.

Fabric Backing

From box springs is set aside — this material works perfectly as agricultural weed barrier.

The outer fabric cover is typically the only portion that can't be recycled. Everything else has value.

5

Baling and Transport

Once sorted, materials get compressed into dense bales for efficient transport to processors.

Foam bales head to carpet padding manufacturers, where the foam gets shredded and reformed into padding for new carpet installations. Specialty foams like latex sometimes go to manufacturers making dog beds, gymnastics pit foam, or other specialty products.

Metal bales go to scrap processors where the steel gets melted down and re-enters the supply chain as raw material for new products.

Clean wood becomes wood chips for landscaping or biomass fuel.

Materials ready for transport

The Numbers

Over 90% of the materials inside a mattress can be recovered and reused. Since 2011, our recycling efforts have:

1.15+ million mattresses recycled
30,000+ tons of materials recovered
26 million+ sq ft of landfill space saved

Every mattress we recycle keeps roughly 80-100 pounds of material out of a landfill — material that would otherwise sit there for decades.

How This Started

A Bedder World started in 2011 with one person and a simple question: why are so many mattresses going to landfills when they're full of recyclable material?

Our founder Tim started tearing apart mattresses behind a mattress factory in Colorado. One mattress at a time, learning what was inside them and where those materials could go. Fifteen years later, that same hands-on approach has scaled into a nationwide operation — but the fundamentals haven't changed. Real people, real recycling, real impact.

Tim's father, who ran that original mattress factory, now works alongside him in the recycling business. The mattress industry runs in the family — except now we're focused on what happens at the end of a mattress's life, not just the beginning.

Learn more about our story →
Tim Sumerfield, Founder of A Bedder World

Tim Sumerfield, Founder & CEO

Who Trusts Us

We handle mattress recycling for organizations that care about doing this right:

Hospitality

Marriott hotels across 300+ locations

Retail

Walmart, Casper

Universities

Arizona State University, University of Kentucky, University of Denver, and many more

Municipalities

Boulder County, Austin, San Diego, Chicago, and cities across the country

When you need mattresses handled responsibly at scale, we're the team that shows up.

Need a Mattress Picked Up?

We make it easy. Book online, and we'll handle the rest — pickup, hauling, and recycling included.

Schedule Pickup View Pricing

Starting at $125 • Next-day service available • All 50 states