The City of San Diego is celebrating the success of its Mattress Recycling Program, with an impressive 16,921 mattresses collected for recycling in 2024. In fact, if you lined up all of the mattresses recycled and kept out of the landfill (each about 80 inches long), they would stretch the 21 miles from Old Town to Tijuana!  
 
San Diegans can drop off their unwanted mattresses and box springs for free at the Mattress Collection Site just outside the Miramar Landfill entrance. The City collects the units and sends them to a processing facility in Ontario, where they are broken down into four main components (steel, foam, fiber and wood), which are used to make new products such as construction rebar, carpet padding, insulation and mulch. Mattress collection hours are 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. Mattresses and box springs must not be severely damaged, wet, twisted, soiled or infested with bedbugs. 
 
Recycling mattresses has many benefits: bulky items are diverted from the landfill; hundreds of new products are created; San Diego gets closer to achieving Zero Waste Plan and Climate Action Plan goals; and illegal dumping of mattresses in the public right of way goes down. In fact, in 2024 the City saw a 25% decrease of mattress dumping over 2023. 
 
The City’s Mattress Recycling Program is made possible thanks to the Mattress Recycling Council (MRC), which recycles 1.4 million mattresses per year statewide. As the MRC enters its 10th year of operation, the piles of recycled mattresses continue to grow. In California, MRC has recycled a total of 13 million mattresses.  

Counting the units in all the states where the program exists (Connecticut, Rhode Island and Oregon), more than 500 million pounds of materials have been recycled, saving 14.9 million cubic yards of landfill space. An added bonus of mattress recycling: the City gets reimbursement from the MRC, which in 2024 amounted to approximately $46,000.   

More information is available at sandiego.gov/mattress. 
 
About the Environmental Services Department: 

The Environmental Services Department (ESD) ensures that City of San Diego residents have a clean and safe environment. The department pursues waste management strategies that emphasize waste reduction; recycling and composting; and environmentally sound landfill management.