A mattress is not a product. It is a stack.
Cover fabric on top, then quilting, then foam, then a board of pressed fiber, then a steel spring unit, then a wooden frame at the bottom.
Take the stack apart and every layer goes somewhere different, or fails to.
Recycling one is therefore not a single process with a single yield. It is six or seven separate markets, each of which either exists or does not.
The headline rate averages all of them together, which is exactly what hides the problem.
One layer has nowhere to go.
Value per pound decides what gets pulled
A dismantler is not sorting by what is recyclable. They are sorting by what somebody will pay to collect.
Steel is the easy one. A spring unit is clean scrap in a known alloy, it is heavy, it has a price quoted daily, and a magnet finds it.
Foam is nearly as good, because rebond carpet underlay is a large industry that buys it by weight and does not care much about color.
Wood goes to mulch or to boiler fuel. Cotton quilting has a fiber market. Every one of those layers has somebody at the far end of a phone with a standing order.
The pad in the middle has none of that, and the reason is what it is made of rather than what it is made from.
It is already the leftovers.
A board pressed out of other people’s scraps
The layer sits directly over the springs and stops the coils pushing through the foam above.
It is called shoddy, which is a textile trade word rather than an insult, and it is made by shredding mixed fabric waste and pressing the fiber into a dense board.
Pull a mattress apart and the pad is the layer that looks wrong. Everything else is one material in one color, and this is a gray mat with red and blue and green threads visible in it.
That mixture is the whole difficulty. A buyer of recycled fiber needs to know what is in the bale, and nobody can tell them.
The composition depends on whichever offcuts were cheapest in whichever month the pad was pressed, in whichever country pressed it.
It is a material with no specification.
Ninety nine percent of the steel and one percent of the pad
California has run a statewide mattress program since 2016, funded by a fee added at the point of sale.
In 2024 the program took apart 1,560,655 units weighing 88,394,995 pounds and recycled 73.7 percent of that weight.
Split by material the averaging falls away. Steel came back at 99.7 percent and wood at 97.5, with quilting and toppers at 76.6 and foam at 63.
Then the tail. Cotton managed 14.5 percent, loose plastics 3.2, other fiber 1.9, and felt and shoddy exactly 1 percent.
Steel accounted for 39.5 percent of everything recovered. Felt accounted for 36,016 pounds, which rounds to zero.
The number that gets published is the average of those.
What a residue sort actually measures
The counterpart to a recovery figure is a residue study, which weighs what came off the line and went to landfill.
In the most recent one, polyurethane foam was 19.5 percent of the residue and shoddy felt pad was 15.6, with other non woven fibers at 13.7 and quilt panels at 8.8.
Against a study five years earlier the pad has fallen from 22 percent, which sounds like progress and mostly reflects thinner pads in newer beds rather than a buyer appearing, in the way that a panel recycling plant or a resold turbine depends on somebody wanting it.
The method is worth knowing before leaning on the percentages. Two facilities contributed roughly 14,465 pounds of residue, sorted into seventeen categories on a floor scale reading to the pound, and normalized to represent one ordinary working day.
That is a careful sample of a small slice, not a census of the state.
It is a snapshot.
Why the fee keeps rising
Four states now run mattress stewardship programs, and all of them work the same way.
A charge is added to every mattress and foundation sold, the money funds free collection and dismantling, and a nonprofit administers it under state oversight.
In California that charge went to 18 dollars a unit this April, up from 16, with the increase attributed to labor, transport and operating costs rather than to any change in what is recovered.
That direction of travel is the honest signal. Dismantling is manual work, the value recovered is mostly scrap steel, and the gap between the two is what the fee covers, as the program’s own notice sets out.
Closing the last quarter of that weight means finding a buyer for a material nobody can describe.
The felt pad is not hard to remove.
It is hard to sell.
