Recology is pleased to offer easy and convenient options for you to recycle items that don't fit or don't belong in your regular collection bins. Customers can have things like old furniture, electronics, appliances, bundled or boxed clothes, and mattresses picked up through Recology’s Bulky Item Recycling Program. View a list of accepted items. Residential customers are entitled to one or two curbside collections per year at no additional charge. For a nominal fee, residential customers can schedule additional Bulky Item Recycling collections or can engage us to pick up large or bulky items from inside your garage or home. Commercial customers can schedule Bulky Item Recycling pickups for a fee. Businesses utilize this service every day as a low-cost hauling service that recycles as much as possible. Both residential and commercial customers can schedule a Bulky Item Recycling pickup using our online form or by phone at (415) 330-1300. Please note that large items collected through this program, such as sofas and tables, will be recycled by material type and may be broken down.
No-Charge Curbside Collection for San Francisco Residents Our curbside collection service lets you request a curbside pickup of large and heavy items that are not disposed of every day (ex. sofas, desks, file cabinets, and exercise equipment) as well as boxes, bags, or bundles of textiles, shoes, pots & pans, books, VHS tapes, and other household items. For a full list of acceptable items, please visit our Bulky Item Recycling page. This service is included in your regular monthly rate. You can have up to 10 items per collection, with up to 10 additional boxes, bags, or bundles of textiles for your collection. View a full list of acceptable collection items. Residential customers receive two no-charge curbside collections per year, while apartment dwellers have one no-charge curbside collection. Request a Bulky Item Recycling pickup. San Francisco residents are encouraged to recycle textiles through Recology’s Bulky Item Recycling program. Through our textile collection program, we will take all garments, sheets, curtains, belts, hats, bags, purses, socks, and shoes.
We will take items that are ripped or torn, dirty, or mismatched shoes or socks. Customers have two options to recycle unwanted textiles: include textiles in your Bulky Item Recycling curbside collection without them counting toward your ten item limit, or schedule a special textile collection. Special textile collections are for bags, boxes, or bundles of textiles and do not count toward your no-charge curbside collection annual limit. Wet or moldy textiles cannot be recycled and are not acceptable in Textile Only collections and will be counted toward your item limit on regular curbside collections. If you have wet or moldy textiles, you may use one of your 10 items in your Bulky Item pickup, or you can place them in your black trash cart for regular collection. Request a Bulky Item Recyclling textile pickup - an easy way to recycle your unwanted textiles! Bulky Item Recycling for San Francisco Residents Already used your no-charge Bulky Item Recycling collections?
Want Recology to come inside your home and collect the items you'd like picked up? Recology offers a low-cost hauling service for San Franciscans. There is no limit to the number of items we will collect in a collection, and we would be happy to come inside your home and remove items for you. Visit Bulky Item Recycling to get a quote and convenient appointment. Bulky Item Recycling for San Francisco Businesses Recology offers an easy option for your hard-to-handle items. Bulky Item Recycling is a low-cost hauling service that is offered to commercial customers in San Francisco for large or frequent pickups of bulky items. There is no limit on the amount of items we collect, and we provide free estimates and convenient scheduling. Read more about our acceptable items and services for commercial customers. Drop off materials at the SF Dump at 501 Tunnel Avenue! These materials include things like broken furniture, and large metal or plastic items, and are run across a conveyor belt and sorted for material recovery.
If Recology employees find items in good working condition, such as a desk and chair, they pull them from the pile and stage them in a separate area for donation to St. Vincent de Paul. We call this program “Perfectly Good”. Materials collected through the Bulky Item Recycling Program are recycled. If you have items that are in excellent condition that you no longer want, you may wish to donate them for reuse to agencies such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Learn more about bulky items and resource recovery.The thousands of mattresses that get dumped on Bay Area streets each year may soon become a thing of the past. A statewide program that began this month allows anyone to drop off unwanted mattresses for free at participating recycling centers. Funded by an $11 fee that customers pay every time they buy a new mattress or box spring, the program — called Bye Bye Mattress — also mandates that retailers dispose of old mattresses when delivering a new one. The Used Mattress Recovery and Recycling Act facilitates the turning of old bed furnishings into a variety of consumer goods.
The outer fabric and inner foam become carpet padding and building insulation. The springs get converted into steel products. The wood scaffolding is ground up and turned into mulch. “It’s just amazing,” said state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, who sponsored the legislation, which passed in 2013. She helped create the program after hearing complaints from West Oakland merchants fed up with mattresses being discarded in their neighborhoods. A similar Bye Bye Mattress program started last year in Connecticut, and one is expected to begin this spring in Rhode Island. The idea, Hancock said, is to cut down on the amount of bulky garbage that piles up on sidewalks. “It’s a health hazard,” she said. “If it rains, you get mold, insects and rats.” Mattresses have long been a source of blight in many Bay Area cities. More than 6,000 were left out in Oakland last year, mostly in the poor flatland neighborhoods. Between 4,000 and 8,000 were abandoned in nearby San Francisco.
Public works employees in Berkeley cleared 1,100 mattresses off the sidewalk between June 2014 and June 2015. Because of their size and consistency — wood and metal encased in polyurethane foam — mattresses can sit moldering on the street for years. Moving them is a headache for city workers, and a strain on the public purse. In Oakland, taxpayers spent $5.5 million last year clearing mattresses and other oversize junk off the streets. The problem is particularly egregious in neighborhoods such as West Oakland, which struggles to attract business. “If you’re in an area that already has economic problems, mattresses can be a tipping-point issue,” Hancock said. “They make the neighborhood look blighted and feel unsafe.” Yet getting rid of them was never easy, said Arthur Boone, a veteran of the recycling business who ran a mattress dismantling factory in East Oakland in the 1990s. “The garbage people hate mattresses because they tear up bulldozers,” Boone said.
“You have to separate them by hand.” But that process can’t happen in a landfill, so mattresses have to be hauled to special plants like the one Boone ran, where workers strip apart their materials. One such place, the DR3 Recycling center in Oakland, has been collecting used mattresses since 2000. It’s now one of the state’s free drop-off spots. When a mattress arrives at the DR3 warehouse, it gets stripped, skinned, eviscerated and fed through a shearing machine. Its springs are crushed into bales and sent off to steel factories. Its cotton is bundled, its wood split apart. Employees Nery Garcia works on separating materials from a mattress at Oakland's DR3 Mattress Recycling Center in Oakland, California, on Friday, January 15, 2016. A new state law allows residents to recycle mattresses for free. A new state law allows residents to recycle ... more Facility manager Robert Jack gives a tour of Oakland's DR3 Mattress Recycling Center in Oakland, California, on Friday, January 15, 2016.
Behind him at right is a company choosing select mattresses to reuse materials for new mattresses. Since the statewide recycling program began Jan. 1, DR3 Recycling has seen a huge spike in business, said General Manager Robert Jaco. Now it pulls in hundreds more mattresses per day than it did before the law kicked in. The Bay Area has five other free recycling sites in San Leandro, Hayward, San Jose, Sunnyvale and American Canyon, but Hancock hopes that more will sprout up, now that the Bye Bye Mattress program is in place. “We’ve created a market,” she said. Mike O’Donnell, head of the Mattress Recycling Council — which runs the California program, as well as its counterparts in Connecticut and Rhode Island — is similarly optimistic. He expects that from now on, California will recycle about a million mattresses a year. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Where to drop off mattresses Bay Area Mattress Recycling Centers where people can drop off unwanted mattresses for free: