A Loss for Regional Queensland: Why Mattress Recycling Needs a Systemic Reset

It is with disappointment and frustration that the Australian Bedding Stewardship Council (ABSC) shares the news that Incredable Recycling in Mackay, Queensland, has closed its doors.

For over a decade, Incredable Ltd was a pillar of the Mackay community, operating as a proud not-for-profit social enterprise. They didn’t just rescue waste from landfill; they provided purpose, secure employment, and on-the-job training for local job seekers facing significant barriers to work.

When they lost the Mackay Tip Shop contract in mid-2025, the team refused to give up on their mission. They set up a dedicated office and collection point specifically to tackle complex, hard-to-recycle items: mattresses, gas bottles, and fire extinguishers. They invested heavily in heavy machinery, including a metal baler and a foam baler, and pounded the pavement, pitching to local councils, retail stores, and commercial mining camps.

Unfortunately, the market forces lined up against them proved insurmountable. Their story is indicative of the systemic issues plaguing regional mattress recycling in Australia.

The Economic Headwinds: A Perfect Storm

Mattress recycling is famously tough – high labour costs and razor thin margins. For the best resource recovery ratio, a mattress requires manual deconstruction to separate its core components: steel springs, polyurethane foam, and timber. For a regional recycler, making this economically viable requires every piece of the puzzle to come together. For Incredable Recycling, those pieces were too disjointed.

• The Landfill Dilemma: Without local council mandates or financial disincentives, it remains vastly cheaper for businesses and residents to dump mattresses directly into landfill. Because there were no landfill constraints to drive behavioural change, a sustainable commercial pipeline for recycling never materialised.
• The Broken Steel Chain: Even when Incredable successfully stripped the mattresses down and baled the metal, macroeconomic factors broke the loop. Major steel traders, would not take the clean, high quality baled steel, mirroring systemic, industry-wide issues we recently highlighted in our ABSC Steel Blog. We have seen local scrap dynamics leaving high-quality recovered bedding steel stockpiled or landfilled.
• Limited Markets for Foam: With a foam baler ready to go, Incredable still faced a dead end. While the ABSC is actively developing opportunities for PU foam and memory foam, post-consumer mattress foam does not have a national off-take market.

The Systemic Perspective: What Needs to Change?

The closure of Incredable Recycling is proof that individual social enterprises or isolated councils cannot carry the burden of regional mattress recycling alone. When we look at the geography of regional, rural, and remote Australia, individual towns simply do not generate the sheer volume of waste required to keep a dedicated processing facility solvent.

To stop this from happening again, we must establish a Hub and Spoke Model driven by Regional Organisations of Councils (ROCs).

A Call to Action for Regional Leadership

We need a unified approach across bodies like the Far North Queensland ROC (FNQROC), North Queensland ROC (NQROC), and Central Queensland ROC (CQROC).

To sustain mattress recycling, local leadership must be willing to act on two fronts:

1. Collaborate Regionally, Act Locally: Councils must band together under a shared regional framework to aggregate mattress volumes, creating a reliable, high-volume “hub” that makes resource recovery commercially viable for an operator.
2. Commit to True Cost Pricing: Councils must have the courage to implement landfill constraints and charge businesses and residents the true cost of waste management. When landfilling is kept artificially cheap because space is abundant, we actively subsidise environmental harm and undermine social enterprises that support vulnerable communities.

The ABSC team knows how hard the Incredable Recycling team worked to deliver recovery and recycling to Queensland. We will miss their contributions to our Approved Recycler Network and their passion for driving sustainability. We will continue to advocate fiercely for product stewardship, robust regional infrastructure, and the policy changes needed to ensure that regional recycling can succeed.

To find your nearest active ABSC-approved mattress recycler, or to learn more about how product stewardship is working to solve these systemic design flaws, please visit our Recycling page.