A new mattress turns up compressed in a box. The old one still has to leave the house at full size, and most people work out what their council allows at exactly the moment it is standing in the hallway.
There is no national rule. Kerbside collection is run by each council, so what is free in one suburb is a booking and a fee in the next. The options themselves are the same everywhere, and the prices are published, which is enough to plan around.
Around 1.8 million mattresses go to landfill in Australia each year, a figure Planet Ark attributes to the Australian Bedding Stewardship Council.
Free first
A booked council collection is the option most households already have and forget about. Many councils include one or two bulky waste collections a year at no charge, and most treat mattresses as a separate booking with their own cap. Leaving one on the kerb without a booking counts as illegal dumping.
Because the terms are set per council rather than per capital, the only reliable answer is your own council's page. Planet Ark's Recycling Near You directory looks up both council services and commercial recyclers by postcode, and is the shortest route to a correct answer.
Free drop-off at a Soft Landing site is the option least likely to be signposted. Soft Landing is a not-for-profit mattress recycler, and it accepts drop-offs at no charge at Smithfield in Sydney, Redhead near Newcastle, Hume in Canberra and Wangara in Perth. The only cost is getting it there.
A charity will take a mattress that is genuinely still good, which in practice means clean, unstained, and something the person donating it would still sleep on. Charities pay to dispose of what they cannot resell, so a tired mattress dropped at an op shop becomes their landfill fee rather than yours.
What collection costs
| Service | Cost | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Soft Landing collection | $78 first piece, $65 each additional | Sydney, Hunter, Melbourne, Perth |
| Soft Landing collection | $74.44 first piece, $58.49 each additional | ACT |
| ACT NoWaste bulky waste | $46.35 per mattress or base | Canberra kerbside |
| ACT drop-off | $51.25 per mattress or base | Mugga Lane, Mitchell |
| IKEA removal with a delivery | From $69 | NSW, ACT, VIC, WA, SA |
A mattress and its ensemble base each count as one item everywhere in that table, so a full bed is two fees.
Soft Landing charges the same whether the mattress is a single or a king, which makes it better value the bigger the bed. Its service covers NSW, the ACT, Victoria and WA. Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory are outside its network, and South Australia is served by Bounce Back Recycling instead.
What gets a mattress refused
This is the part worth checking before loading the car, because a refused mattress at the gate means a second trip.
Soft Landing will not take a mattress with active vermin, fleas, bed bugs or spiders, or one with blood stains or excrement. Motorised bases are also out, except in WA with a quote first.
Wet and mouldy mattresses are accepted, which runs against the advice given almost everywhere else. A mattress that has been rained on in a carport is still recyclable. One that has had bed bugs is not, and wrapping it in plastic before it leaves the bedroom stops the problem spreading.
Up to 75 per cent of a mattress or base can be recovered once it is dismantled, according to the ACT government: steel springs to scrap, foam to carpet underlay, timber to mulch. Soft Landing describes the same number as a target rather than an average.
Buying a new one is the cheapest time to deal with the old one
The removal fee is lower when it rides along with a delivery that is already happening.
IKEA will collect an old mattress at the same time as delivering a new one, from $69, through Soft Landing in NSW, the ACT, Victoria and WA and Bounce Back in South Australia. The service has to be booked with the purchase, not afterwards, and it is not offered in Queensland.
Most bed-in-a-box brands do not offer removal at all, because the mattress arrives by courier rather than on a truck with two people on it. Traditional retailers that deliver with their own crews are the ones more likely to take the old one, and it is worth asking at the point of sale rather than on delivery day.
A mattress returned inside a trial period is a separate matter, and those all go to charity or recycling rather than back to the warehouse, which is why a stain ends a trial. What each brand allows is set out in our comparison of mattress trials and warranties.
If the mattress is only a few years old
A sag that has appeared inside the warranty period is a claim rather than a disposal job, and the thresholds are lower than most people assume: 20mm at some brands, 30mm at others. Those figures, and the base conditions that can end a claim before it is assessed, are in what each mattress warranty asks of a bed base.
