Why a mattress is the awkward one
A mattress is too big for any bin, too bulky for a car, refused by most skips, and unwanted by charities however clean it is. It is also heavy in a way that makes it a two-person item, and unhelpfully floppy while you carry it down stairs.
That combination is why it ends up propped against a wall for six months, and why it is one of the most commonly fly-tipped items in the city. There are four legitimate routes, and it is worth picking one deliberately.
The four routes
Take it yourself. Bristol's reuse and recycling centres accept mattresses from residents, and this is the cheapest option by a distance. You need a vehicle it will actually fit in, someone to help you load it, and to check the current opening hours and whether the site needs booking before you set off.
The council's bulky waste collection. Booked and paid for online, collected from outside your property boundary, typically after a wait of a few weeks. Good value if you can get it outside and are not in a hurry.
Retailer take-back. If a new mattress is arriving, ask the retailer at the point of order whether they will take the old one away. Many will, sometimes for a small fee, but it is arranged when you buy, not on the delivery day.
Collection from inside. A clearance firm collects from the bedroom rather than the kerb, which is the entire difference in price. For us a single mattress is a minimum load at £50, and a mattress plus a bed frame and a couple of other things is not much more, because the trip is most of the cost.
What happens to it afterwards
A mattress that reaches a specialist is pulled apart rather than buried: the steel goes for metal recycling, the foam is reprocessed, and the fabric and felt are recovered. That takes a dedicated facility, which is why mattresses are separated out at the point of collection rather than mixed into a general load.
It is also why nobody can take one as part of a mixed skip. If your plan involves a skip for everything else, the mattress still needs its own answer.
The one thing not to do
Leaving it on the pavement, in an alley or on a verge is fly-tipping. It is a criminal offence, it is enforced, and mattresses are among the easiest items for an investigation to trace because of what tends to be tipped alongside them. Every other route on this page, including the free one, costs less than being prosecuted. GOV.UK explains how fly-tipping is reported, which is worth knowing from either side of it.
