A great mattress is essential for a good night’s sleep, but eventually they need replacing when they get too grubby, lose their spring, or just retain the imprint of our bodies even when we’ve been out of bed for hours. How should we be disposing of old mattresses when we get a new one?
You can dispose of an old mattress that’s no longer useful at the tip, or arrange a bulky waste collection from the local council. If there’s still life in old mattresses, you can see if any friend of family want it, or list it online in places like local Facebook Groups.
The big problem with getting rid of mattresses tends to be their size, especially with mattresses that are double or larger. For that reason, many people write off the option of taking them to the tip, yet you’ll often see large skips filled with old mattresses when you visit your local Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC).
How Long Should A Mattress Last?
As with the majority of products, their life heavily depends on how they’re used. For those of us that are on the heavier side, our mattresses have to work harder to retain their bounce than for the average person, and the inverse is true for those on the lighter side of the spectrum.
Another factor is how long you sleep for. I sleep for between six and seven hours a night, whereas my wife needs and hour or two more than me. That means she’s lying in bed for around 20% longer than me each night, which will impact on the lifespan of our double mattress.
In our case, the fact that I’m heavier will at least partially balance out those two factors, so we don’t tend to find that one site wears out a lot faster than the other. What’s more, those are just two of the more obvious factors.
While it’s far from an exhaustive list, things like how much you sweat, what you wear in bed, how much you roll around in your sleep and even the type of bed frame can impact on how long you mattress will last before it needs to be disposed of to make way for a comfortable, clean replacement.
Mattresses should last for between seven and ten years, but there are many factors that can impact on their lifespan. When a mattress is no longer comfortable or reduces the quality of your sleep, it’s time to start thinking about a replacement.
Popular Swedish retailer IKEA guarantee their mattresses for ten years, so that’s a good indicator that they’re confident that their customers are going to get at least a decade of quality sleep from their product line.
As guidance suggests that mattresses should be changed every seven to eight years, and maximum guarantees run up to a decade, a little maths shows how much life you get from a mattress.
Most adults sleep between six and nine hours per night, with most falling into the shorter end of the spectrum even though experts quote eight hours as a target.
Based on those ranges, here’s how many hours that a mattress will support you for:
| 7 Years | 8 Years | 9 Years | 10 Years | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Hours Per Night | 15,330 Hours | 17,520 Hours | 19710 Hours | 21,900 Hours |
| 7 Hours Per Night | 17,885 Hours | 20,440 Hours | 22,995 Hours | 25,550 Hours |
| 8 Hours Per Night | 20,440 Hours | 23,360 Hours | 26,280 Hours | 29,200 Hours |
| 9 Hours Per Night | 22,995 Hours | 26,280 Hours | 29,565 Hours | 32,850 Hours |
As you can see, you spend a lot of time in bed, and it’s worth remembering that when you see the price tag on a high quality mattress!
Can You Get A Mattress In A Car?
When we last changed the mattresses in our home, we did them all at the same time, thinking that would save us some cash. The council will collect three items for a fixed fee, so the plan was to send the three double mattresses with that collection and the fourth single mattress would hopefully squash into the car to take to the tip here in Sheffield.
Be warned that when the time comes, lifting a double mattress from its bed frame is heavy, but the bigger problem is how cumbersome they are and tough to manoeuvre. Getting a large mattress through door frames and down star cases needs a degree of physical fitness and a large dose of patience.
What we did discover though is that the double mattresses went into the boot of my Ford Focus quite easily. It’s certainly at least a two person job, but by folding the mattress along its longest side, while that makes it deeper, the other two dimensions are actually then less than a single mattress.
With the back seats down and a lot of encouragement, the double mattress did go through the boot hatch of the car, and the mattress only needed to bend a little behind the driver and passenger seats to get in far enough for the boot to close.
A single mattress is likely to fit into a family car with the back seats folded down, and by folding double mattresses, they will often go into the car with a bit of effort. Larger mattress sizes such as those for king and queen sized beds may need a bulky items collection from the council.
Mattress Donations
Donating anything to a good cause is a great thing to do – there are always people that are grateful to accept something they need but struggle to afford.
Mattresses are a slightly tricky item though, as there’s a clear link to hygiene. If you’ve got a heavily soiled mattress or one that’s just too far past its best, it’s less likely that it will be useful to others, but those in reasonable condition are likely to be in demand.
By all means offer it to friends and family in the first instance – charity begins at home as they say. If that’s not fruitful though, you can use local social media groups or some supermarkets have boards for community notices that you might be able to use like an old style classified ad in the local newspaper.
A better option might be to contact local charities and outlets for national good causes, like you would for donating other furniture like sofas.
While it’s best to contact them directly, the general guidance for mattress donation is that they should be stain free and usable. The additional mandatory condition will be the presence of a fire safety label.
Can I Put A Mattress In A Skip?
If you happen to have a skip on your driveway or on the road outside the house for another project, you can almost certainly place a mattress into it to be taken away. If you want confirmation, check with the company you’re hiring from, or we’ve got more details about skip hire on the site including how long you can keep it for.
We’ve heard other people say that some companies have said mattresses cannot go into skips, but in our experience they’re fine, provided they don’t exceed the weight limit for the skip with all the other rubbish, and fit in without rising above the top or dangling over the side.
Hiring a skip purely to dispose of a mattress probably won’t make sense though, as the cost is likely to be significantly greater than the council bulky waste collections we mentioned earlier.
If you do have a lot of other rubbish to throw away though, skip hire can be a good option, and instead of paying the council to take the mattresses away, you can put that towards skip rental instead.
Get A Skip Hire Quote From Skoup
If you’re familiar with Biffa who run nationwide waste management services, you might be interested to know that they’ve got a service called Skoup for homeowners to hire skips and other collection alternatives.
Get a quote from Skoup for skip hire hereLocal Skip Hire Quotes
If you’d prefer a local skip hire company in your area, we’ve teamed up with Quotatis who will get you quotes by filling in this simple form:
Will Companies Delivering Mattresses Take Old Ones Away?
A lot of companies will take away your old mattress when delivering a new one, but it does vary dramatically, and appears to have very little rhyme or reason.
Using the example from earlier, IKEA will take your old mattress for free if you book the service alongside a mattress delivery. Obviously it’s not practical to individually list every mattress delivery company here, so you can check on their websites if you have an idea of where you might buy one from.
The high street retailers generally charge for their removal and recycle service, with most falling in the £20 to £30 range, and in most cases that was per mattresses, not per visit. For that reason, I’d recommend checking your local council’s bulky waste collections, especially if you have several mattresses to go.
From our research, companies fall into one of the following groups:
- Will take one old mattress for free for each one bought and delivered (usually at the same time as the delivery)
- Offer mattress removal and disposal as a paid service in addition to a purchase with delivery
- Recommend a third party collection service to customers
- Offer no disposal service or advice at all
What’s interesting is we didn’t find any companies that sell mattresses and would offer a removal service without a delivery service being purchased, suggesting that it’s not a profitable add on.
Perhaps that’s more likely to be available from a local retailer rather than the national chains, so just because we didn’t locate one, doesn’t mean they’re not offered anywhere.
How To Order Mattress Removal
Let’s assume in the first instance that the company you buy from will remove your old mattresses – be sure to ask about this as you’re negotiating your purchase. The fact that we’ve told you IKEA will do this for free is useful for you – use it as a bargaining chip if you’re buying anywhere else!
Whichever company you use, they won’t know whether you’re really interested in buying an IKEA mattress, just make sure they know that you know a free removal service is available there. It might mean you can get that thrown in for free where they’d otherwise charge for it, or even if they are reluctant to offer a disposal service at all!
What’s key is to make sure that your purchase includes the delivery of the new mattress and collection of the old one at the point of sale – after you’ve bought and they’ve got your money, there’s less incentive for them to offer a freebie or discounted service.
If You Can’t Book A Mattress Removal
While a disposal service is ideal both from a cost and convenience perspective, it’s not the be all and end all. The most important thing is you get the new mattress you want. We all get grumpy with a lack of sleep, so don’t rate delivery and disposal above the mattress itself.
You’ve always got alternatives, including the tip, skip hire and council bulky waste collections we covered earlier to fall back on.
Are Mattresses Recycled?
Most people are wise to the need to recycle as much as possible to do our bit for our planet. That applies as much to minimising the use of new raw materials as it does to avoiding unnecessary waste going into landfills like it almost all did a few decades ago.
If you’re familiar with the difficulty in recycling old duvets and pillows (you can read more about why pillows don’t get recycled here and what you should do with old duvets here), then you might be surprised to learn that mattresses are much more useful for recycling.
Most council tips accept mattresses, which get broken down and recycled in their constituent parts. For example, metal sprung mattresses can have the springs removed from the covers and fillings to recycle the metal. Similarly the foam in a memory foam mattress is likely to be recycled.
Mattress fillings often take up a new life in certain textiles like carpets (especially underlay) and other applications where padding is required, like pet beds and cushions.
While springs and fillings are often recycled and re-used for new purposes, it’s the mattress covers that are least useful. That doesn’t always mean they’re totally useless though, for example, many areas operate waste incinerators that offer controlled burning of non-recyclables instead of fossil fuels. This serves two purposes – one is getting rid of waste and the other is to create electricity and heat as two forms of greener energy, again used for other purposes like heating buildings.
Can I Burn An Old Mattress?
Whenever we talk to people about disposal of any materials, there’s a chance that the age old myth of a bonfire in the garden will come up. While it’s true that there are very few restrictions on when you’re allowed to have a bonfire, there certainly are a lot of rules about what you can burn, or more specifically what you can’t burn.
Mattresses would give off a lot of toxic fumes if they’re burned, so you can’t chuck them on the bonfire or chop them up and throw them into an incinerator bin for burning rubbish.
Mattresses And Fly Tipping
While we’re on the subject of what not to do, we’ve all driven down a country lane and spotted a fly tipped pile of waste illegally dumped in a ditch, field or hedge.
While we’re sure none of our readers would be so inconsiderate to deliberately allow their waste to share this fate, beware of cheap waste removal companies advertising on the web or that your shifty mate at the pub swears by.
If the price seems too cheap to believe compared to the reputable companies, there’s a real risk that your waste isn’t being disposed of responsibly. What’s more, if it’s somehow traced back to you, you might get a knock on the door and a share of the blame for the mess.
Another form of fly tipping is using someone else’s skip without permission. With the popularity of CCTV and video doorbells, the chance of getting caught this way is now very real, and the potential fines are huge.
You can read more about fly tipping and the scale of the problem here.
