In the world of waste disposal, mattresses are like retirement deniers, notoriously reluctant to accept their own end.
Bulky, light and clingy, they’re known to “float” up like bobber lures, fighting to the top of the waste pile like lost hikers trying to get the attention of a rescue plane, as though to yell, "Don't leave me here!”
Whether the logistical casualty of relocation, basic replacement or upgrade addiction, mattress turnover is a daily headache for Wyoming’s landfill operators.
“They’re a huge pain in the butt,” said Darryl Johner, manager of the Torrington city landfill.
As Johner describes it, mattresses have a personified and zombie-esque will to live.
He buries them with dirt and heavy debris, but they manage to grasp hold of his compactor's cleats, yanking themselves upward and even dangling on, like an obstinate cat clinging to the curtain.
And if he doesn’t keep a close eye, mattresses can sneakily hitch to the back of a scraper for a ride across the lot, bringing to mind a square of toilet paper stuck on a boot heel.
“Those damn mattresses get hooked on our scrapper, and you drag that thing all the way over the borrowing area and you don’t realize it,” Johner said.
Mattresses Attack The Bottom Line
At the Fremont County Solid Waste Disposal District, mattresses are not merely a nuisance, they’re outright saboteurs, said Andy Frey of Trihydro, an engineering consulting firm that works with Fremont County.
Frey explains how mattresses hurl themselves into the metal tracking of bulldozers, compactors and shredders. Then their tensile metal frames get wound around the axles, gum up the drivetrain and damage seals.
“Instead of operating the equipment, your operator is underneath it with a wire cutter or a bolt cutter or sometimes even a torch, trying to get that mattress freed up from the drivetrain,” he said. “They take out seals, and then you lose your fluids from your axle system.
“It’ll damage brakes, or it can just get hung up in tracks and interfere with the movement and give you premature wear.”
Not only do they tack on operation costs, mattresses flout the No. 1 prerogative of waste management — compaction — which hurts the bottom line.
Frey describes a landfill’s product as a sphere of airspace, equal parts above and below ground. Profits depend on how much material they can pack into the space.
“At the end of the day, the only thing a landfill has to sell is the airspace in that bubble,” he said. “That’s the only revenue stream, so you need everything within that bubble compacted and tight as possible.
“What a mattress does, as you hook it unintentionally, it migrates to the top and loosens the waste around its perimeter and you lose compaction.”
One Man’s Trash, Another Man's Bed
At Flanigan’s Furniture in Casper, old mattresses virtually dispose of themselves.
Customers who buy a new bed can offload their old one, and the company will take care of disposal. More often than not, though, old mattresses never make it to the city landfill or donation center, because opportunistic residents scoop them off the company's flatbed trailer.
“I check the cameras and it's almost nightly,” said manager Jordan Flanigan. “I’ll see people drive by at 3 a.m. and scope out what’s there.”
Technically, it's trespassing and theft, but Flanigan doesn’t seem to mind; one less trip to the landfill. Besides, he knows how important a mattress can be, and he doesn’t want anyone to go without a good night's sleep.
“If someone doesn’t have the means to get a mattress and sees one in our trailer in good shape, I’m not opposed to it,” he said. “Plus, it saves us the expense [of disposal].”
If only mattress disposal were as easy for waste managers.
Becky Kiefer, superintendent of Teton County Solid Waste and Recycling, tours the Spring Back recycling facility where mattresses are dismantled and recycled. (Courtesy Cindy Harger) 
Darryl Johner tinkers with a dozer at Torrington city landfill. For landfills, mattresses can be a nightmare to deal with, he said. (Courtesy Darryl Johner)
Beds Get Snubbed
The nuisance of mattress disposal has led some landfills to prohibit them entirely.
Sweetwater County Solid Waste District No. 1 in 2024 stopped burying mattresses, Cowboy State Daily reported, while at the same time the regional trash collector Wyoming Waste Systems stopped collecting them.
It’s now on county residents to drop off mattresses themselves and pay a $35 recycling fee to do it. Although there is some concern that residents will take a different route.
Green River Mayor Pete Rust said illegal dumpsites have sprung up across Sweetwater County over the years, and that mattresses are among the most common things left at them. Illegal dumping is a growing issue for the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming as well, at an expense to taxpayers.
“I’ve driven all over our county's dirt roads and I see where people dump stuff. I think certain people just aren’t going to take their mattresses to Rock Springs and pay $35,” he said, adding that only time will tell if the mandated drop-off recycling program works as designed.
“The other day I saw a vehicle headed toward the landfill with mattresses, and I was tempted [to tail them] to see if they turned right toward the landfill or turned left out of town to dump it,” Rust said.
In the end, he gave them the benefit of the doubt and went on his own way.
Recycling Junkies
The picture is a bit different in Teton County, which in contrast is something of a recycling junky.
In addition to county-run commercial cardboard and food waste programs, as well as robust residential participation in curbside recyclable pickups, residents here will even haul their own 5-gallon buckets of food waste to the Integrated Solid Waste & Recycling facility, which they’ll haul back once again in the form of topsoil later on.
It’s little surprise it has the longest running and highest volume mattress recycling program in the state, which processes around 1,000 a year through a Utah-based partner, said Cindy Harger, waste diversion outreach coordinator for Integrated Solid Waste & Recycling.
A major factor is the hospitality industry, with institutions like the Wort Hotel providing a steady flow of king and queen mattresses in need of disposal, Hager said.
Another factor is Teton County culture.
“The culture here is very much about having as little environmental impact as possible, because we see the value both in terms of our own quality of life and surrounding nature but also for the millions of visitors that come here every year,” said Hager.
The mattresses are delivered for processing to Utah-based Spring Back, which uses most of the material:
• Foam and pillow top layers are rebounded into carpet padding.
• Steel is melted at a foundry and made into rebar for use in the construction industry.
• Wood is repurposed into landscape mulch, biomass fuel, or new wood products.
• Cotton is made into “green” home insulation.
• Felt is used to make moving blankets.
Worth The Squeeze?
In some quarters, there are questions of whether mattress recycling is worth the squeeze.
For Darryl Johner at the Torrington city landfill, the idea alone is triggering.
“We went to a recycling seminar, and they cut it open and pulled all the batting out, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I ain't touching that damn thing!’” he said, shuddering at the memory of a bedbug epidemic that unfurled during his years as a trash collector.
“We had to buy a small crane and mount it on the truck so we could pick those things up and nobody had to touch them,” he said.
Redeeming Quality
Over at the Solid Waste Division in Laramie, discarded mattresses have at least one redeeming quality, division manager JR Slingerland told Cowboy State Daily.
Here they use mattresses to clean out the waste baler, a machine that compresses materials into compact and manageable bundles. They pass them through like sponges to soak up and wipe out the gross stuff, before switching from a load of trash to recyclables.
And in a college town like Laramie, that baler is keeping squeaky clean.
“Students are always moving in and out, and they don’t keep their old mattresses. Every day we get some,” Slingerland said. “A few years ago, the university replaced all the mattresses in one of the dorms, and they came here.”
