Casablanca Services is a BPDA-approved City of Boston mattress recycling vendor. The BPDA granted that approval after auditing our recycling process, our insurance and our record — not after reading a brochure.
We lead with that for a specific reason. It is a contract the city awards to a short list of vetted vendors, and most mattress removal outfits in Boston do not hold one. When a municipality puts its own name behind a vendor, it does so after checking where the material actually ends up, because the city carries the consequences if it does not end up where it was supposed to. That check is the entire difference between recycling and a claim about recycling.
Here is what you actually need to know about getting a mattress out of your house in Boston, and why it is more complicated than it was five years ago.
Massachusetts Banned Mattresses From Disposal in 2022
In November 2022, Massachusetts added mattresses to its waste disposal ban. That is the rule underneath everything else on this page.
It means a mattress cannot legally be landfilled, incinerated, or thrown out with regular trash for disposal. It has to be diverted for recycling. The state added mattresses because they are a genuinely bad thing to bury — bulky, slow to break down, and full of steel and foam that could have been recovered — and because there was an established route to recycle them.
Most homeowners find out about the ban in the least useful way possible: by putting the mattress at the curb and watching nothing happen.
Why the Mattress on the Curb Just Sits There
You dragged it down two flights of stairs. It is at the curb. And a week later it is still at the curb, now wet, and now unmistakably yours.
The reason is that the crew coming past is not permitted to take it as trash. The ban applies to them too. So it stays — through rain, which triples its weight and makes it far harder to process, and through however many days it takes for one of several things to go wrong:
- Your city issues you a violation for it, because it is now unpermitted bulk waste on the curb
- Somebody else adds their mattress to yours, because a mattress at a curb attracts mattresses
- It gets soaked, and now the honest recyclers want more to take it and the dishonest ones want less
- You end up moving it back inside, which is the only outcome worse than leaving it out
None of that is a policy failure. It is what happens when a disposal ban meets a curb. The mattress needs a collection route that ends in recycling, and that route has to be arranged rather than hoped for. That is what our mattress pickup and recycling service is.
What Recycling a Mattress Actually Involves
This is the part almost nobody sees, and it is the part that separates the operators.
A mattress is roughly 75% recyclable by weight — but only once it has been taken apart. That qualifier carries all the weight in the sentence. Dismantling is manual work. Somebody physically cuts the mattress open and separates the materials:
- Steel springs. The innerspring unit is a substantial piece of scrap steel and goes straight into metal recycling, where it has real, established value.
- Foam. Recovered and reprocessed, most commonly into carpet underlay — that padding under wall-to-wall carpet is very often somebody’s old mattress.
- Fiber and cotton padding. Recovered and baled for reuse rather than buried.
- Timber frame. Box springs in particular are largely a wooden frame, and the timber is chipped.
Now consider the alternative. A general junk hauler backs a truck up, throws the mattress in with the rest of the load, and compacts it. That single action makes recycling impossible — not difficult, impossible. Once steel, foam, fiber and timber have been crushed together into one mass, there is no process that separates them again. Everything recoverable in that mattress is gone, and the load goes wherever mixed compacted waste goes.
So when a hauler says they recycle, the question worth asking is not whether they say it. It is whether anyone has ever checked. The reason our pricing works the way it does is that dismantling is labor, and labor is what the price is for. A quote noticeably below the cost of doing the work is a quote for not doing the work.
The Credential, and Why We Keep Mentioning It
We are aware that leading three sections with the same contract looks like bragging. It is not really about pride — it is about the only thing you can verify.
You cannot follow the truck. You will never see the dismantling floor. Every company in this business tells you they recycle, and from the curb the honest ones and the dishonest ones look exactly alike: a truck arrives, the mattress leaves, you are happy. The claim is unfalsifiable from where you are standing.
So what is left is: who audited them? The City of Boston did, through the BPDA, before putting the municipality’s own name on the arrangement. We are also a Massachusetts state-certified recycler, licensed and insured, BBB Accredited, and we have been working in Boston and the surrounding communities since 2005. Those are the checks that happened without you having to run them.
If you want the longer version of who we are and how a landscaping company ended up holding a city recycling contract, that story is here.
What It Costs
Plainly, because the industry is not known for it:
- Standard pickup — $79.95 per mattress. That is 20% off our $99.95 list price, and it is a real discount rather than a permanent “sale”. Collection falls inside a 3 to 5 business day window.
- Expedited 24-hour pickup — $119.95 per mattress (list $149.95). Collected within 24 hours on a business day, for when the new bed is arriving Thursday and the old one is in the hallway.
- Box springs — $20 each as an add-on to any pickup.
Recycling and disposal are included in those numbers. There is no tipping fee that appears at the end, which is the most common unpleasant surprise in this trade.
How It Runs
- Weekdays only. Monday through Friday. We do not run mattress pickups at weekends, and we would rather say so now than let you find out on a Saturday.
- Curbside the night before. Put it out the evening before your scheduled day. You do not need to be home, take time off, or wait on a window.
- Free rescheduling. Plans change. Tell us and we move it, at no charge.
- No refunds on completed pickups. Once the mattress has been collected and the recycling cost incurred, that is done. Stated up front rather than buried.
Booking takes about two minutes: pick a weekday, tell us how many mattresses and box springs, and we are done. You can book the pickup online here.
Common Questions
Is it illegal to throw away a mattress in Massachusetts?
Mattresses were added to the Massachusetts waste disposal ban in November 2022, which means they cannot legally be landfilled, incinerated or put out with regular trash for disposal. They have to be diverted for recycling. In practice this is why a mattress left at the curb often simply sits there — the hauler is not permitted to take it as trash, so it stays your problem until it is collected by someone set up to recycle it.
How much does mattress removal cost in Boston?
Standard pickup is $79.95 per mattress — 20% off our $99.95 list price — with collection inside a 3 to 5 business day window. Expedited 24-hour pickup is $119.95 (list $149.95). Box springs are $20 each as an add-on to any pickup. Recycling and disposal are included in those prices; there is no separate tipping fee added at the end.
What actually happens to a recycled mattress?
It gets dismantled by hand rather than crushed. Roughly 75% of a mattress by weight is recoverable once it is taken apart: the steel spring unit goes to metal recycling, the foam is reprocessed into carpet underlay, the cotton and fiber padding is recovered, and the timber frame is chipped. A junk hauler who compacts the same mattress into a truck recycles none of that, because once the materials are crushed together they cannot be separated.
Do I need to be home for the mattress pickup?
No. Put the mattress out at the curb the night before your scheduled weekday and we collect it. You do not need to take time off work or wait around for a window. If the weather is a concern, bag or cover it — a mattress that has been soaked through is heavier and harder to process.
What makes Casablanca different from a junk removal company?
We are a BPDA-approved City of Boston vendor for mattress recycling, which the city approved only after auditing our recycling process, our insurance and our records. We are a Massachusetts state-certified recycler. A junk hauler is licensed to move your mattress somewhere; the contract and the certification are about what happens to it after it leaves your curb, and whether anyone verified it.
Written by Yacine Ibrahimi, Founder & CEO of Casablanca Services, Inc.. Casablanca Services has worked in Greater Boston since 2005 and is the City of Boston's BPDA-contracted mattress recycling vendor. Questions? Call (508) 271-5655.