How do you dispose of a mattress?

What each state's own agency says about mattresses: the page it was read from, the date it was read, and where that state takes it.

The federal baseline

There is no federal rule for throwing out a mattress. EPA counts mattresses as ordinary municipal solid waste, inside the "furniture and furnishings" product category of durable goods — "products with a lifetime of three years or more." EPA reports that furniture and furnishings in municipal solid waste came to 12.1 million tons in 2018, 4.1 percent of all MSW, and that "A significant proportion (19.5 percent) of furniture and furnishings was combusted for energy recovery in 2018, but the majority of this product sector was landfilled (80.1 percent)." What you must do with a mattress is set by your state and your local program, not by federal law.

Read from EPA.

What happens to it

1. A retailer haul-away, a town collection program, or a drop-off site takes the mattress
2. It goes to a recycler instead of a landfill or incinerator, where mattresses are expensive to transport, hard to compact, and can damage processing equipment
3. The mattress is taken apart — more than 75 percent of its components can be reused
4. The recovered materials are then used to manufacture a variety of new products

Steps read from Massachusetts DEP.

All 50 states

One row per state, with the sentence its agency page states, the page itself, the date it was read, and where that state says to take it. A state whose name links has a page of its own; for the rest, this row is everything that state says.