The City of Chelsea will begin charging its trash customers for curbside collection of mattresses and box springs beginning February 1, 2026. The City’s trash customers will be charged $25 per mattress/box spring — fees that are low compared to the cost in neighboring cities, with rates for East Boston, Everett, and Revere beginning at $70-75 per item. Private trash customers will continue to be charged $40 per item.
In 2022, the State of Massachusetts, introduced waste ban regulations that made it illegal to place mattresses and box springs in the trash and required that they be recycled. To make that transition easier for its residents, the City of Chelsea launched a free curbside mattress collection program and paid the cost to recycle these items using city funds. But this program has become unaffordable and unsustainable due its cost and the overwhelming number of service calls the City makes every year.
Since the start of the program, the City has completed 11,094 mattress and box springs pickups, and as of October 2025, the City has spent more than $720,000 to recycle these items for its residents, with each item costing the City about $65 to recycle.
“Our goal is to continue encouraging mattress recycling while keeping mattress-recycling costs low while maintaining fiscal responsibility and protecting taxpayers,” said Fidel Maltez, City Manager for the City of Chelsea. “We have received reports of non-residents and property management companies disposing of mattresses in Chelsea. This is unfair to our community. Implementing these modest fees will help deter these practices and ensure the program remains financially sound.”
The City is hosting a community meeting about the change on Tuesday, December 16, at 6 p.m. at the Chelsea Public Library Auditorium.
The service will remain free for the City’s trash customers until February 1, 2026. To schedule a pickup, residents can call Chelsea 311 by dialing 617-466-4209. For complete mattress instructions visit chelseama.gov/mattress-recycling.
Discarded mattresses that can be difficult to manage. They are expensive to transport, hard to compact, take up lots of landfill space, and can damage incinerator processing equipment. Yet mattresses are made up mostly of recyclable materials. Once disassembled, more than 75 percent of their components can be reused. For more information on the State’s ban on disposing of mattresses and box springs in the trash, visit www.mass.gov/news/new-waste-disposal-ban-regulations-take-effect-today