A mattress is one of the worst things you can put in a landfill and one of the easiest things to recover, which is why it is worth knowing what happens to yours.
Once it reaches the depot the cover is cut away, the foam is pulled out and the springs are stripped. Steel goes to a scrap merchant. Foam is shredded and sold on as carpet underlay. The textile layer is baled for insulation or industrial wiping cloth. What is left after all of that is a fraction of the original volume.
Compare that with the alternative. A whole mattress does not compact. It traps air, springs back, and takes up space in a cell that could have held ten times its weight in genuinely inert waste. Some sites now refuse them outright.
If you are booking a collection, tell us how many mattresses are in the load. They travel differently, they are priced differently, and they leave the site in a different direction to everything else.
