How to get rid of a mattress in Shelby, OH.

Companies that come to your home and carry the mattress out, so you need no vehicle. The prices below are starting prices unless stated — stairs, box springs and extra items add to them.

Most charities will not take a used mattress. These are the ones we checked, including the ones that say no.

• The Salvation Army (satruck.org): accepted-items list includes 'Mattresses' and beds; also says local ordinances and need vary by location and to call 1-800-SA-TRUCK to confirm what a local center accepts. Source
• Doesn’t take mattresses. Habitat for Humanity national ReStore guide: 'Mattresses and box springs are not accepted.' Source

Policies vary by branch. Call before you carry one over — we asked each of the big three directly: Goodwill, the Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity.

What we established about this city in particular — including where it runs nothing of its own and residents have to look elsewhere.

• Shelby runs no trash collection of its own. The city's Service Department page sets out the department's whole remit under the heading "Streets, Water Distribution, Sewer Collection" and states that "Personnel in the Service Department primarily work on the streets and water/sewer distribution lines." The itemized duties are to "Repair lines and roads during water main breaks", "Placing street signs and paints markings on the street", "Performs creek maintenance and removes brush", and "Performs seasonal duties, such as leaf collection and snow removal", plus truck and city-vehicle maintenance by its own mechanics. Refuse, garbage, trash and recycling appear nowhere in the list, and the city's utility offerings are electricity, water and wastewater rather than refuse. So the city collects leaves and snow but not household waste, and a Shelby household arranges collection with a private hauler. The Service Department superintendent is Ron Shepherd at 110 Curtis Drive, 419-342-3151; City Hall is 43 W Main St., Shelby, OH 44875, (419) 347-5131. Note that this is Shelby in Richland County; the similarly named cityofshelby.com belongs to Shelby, North Carolina and its bulky-item rules do not apply here. Source Not confirmed: The city publishes no list of the haulers licensed under Chapter 854 to collect in Shelby, so a resident cannot compare them from the city's own pages. Not confirmed: Because there is no municipal program, the city publishes no mattress price, bulk-item allowance or booking procedure of its own.
• Not an option: Shelby runs an annual city-wide clean-up that takes furniture and excludes a mattress by name, which is the single most useful thing to know before loading one into a truck here. The city's Showing Pride City Wide flyer ran the 2026 collection on Friday, May 22, 2026 from 8am to 4pm and Saturday, May 23, 2026 from 9am to 2pm, at a drop-off location at 73 West State Street, the Electric Department lot. The flyer is explicit that nothing is collected from the curb: under the instruction to bring items from the exterior of the property it prints "(NO curbside pick-up service provided)". The accepted list is "Appliances: stoves, refrigerators, window air conditioners, washers and dryers", "Furniture that is around the EXTERIOR of your property (no mattresses)", "Passenger Vehicle Tires that are NOT ON RIMS", and "Fallen limbs/branches less than 2 inches in diameter (fresh-cut limbs will NOT be accepted)". So furniture is welcome and a mattress is refused inside the same line - a reader who sees a free city furniture collection and assumes bedding counts would make a wasted trip. The separate ITEMS NOT ACCEPTED heading covers "Pesticides, Herbicides, Cleaners", "Electronics: TVs and Computers", "Hazardous Waste: Paints, Stains, Varnishes, Oils, Fluids, and Batteries" and "Commercial/Business, Tractor, Race, or Semi Tires", with dried latex paint accepted. Eligibility is narrow: "Please note this is for Shelby City Residences only", and "the Shelby City Health Department reserves the right to refuse any material deemed unfit for this collection." An electronics recycling event ran alongside it on Saturday, May 23, 2026 from 10 AM to 2 PM. The 2026 dates have passed, and the city has run this collection in successive years, so a resident with a mattress should expect the same exclusion at the next one. Source Not confirmed: The flyer does not say whether a box spring is treated the same as a mattress, though both are bedding and neither is on the accepted list. Not confirmed: No 2027 edition of the clean-up has been published, so the next dates are not established.
• Shelby's refuse ordinance requires everything at the curb to be inside a closed container, and it defines the word, which leaves a mattress with no compliant way to be set out. Codified Ordinances Section 1060.02(a) provides that no person, owner or occupant of land in the city "shall place, for a period exceeding 24 hours, any trash, garbage, refuse or tree or shrub trimmings upon any right-of-way of the city, or any part thereof, including any tree lawn", and that "The trash, garbage, refuse and tree or shrub trimmings shall be placed in a closed and secured container." It then defines the term: "For the purpose of this section, a 'container' shall mean any device creating an enclosed space that can be used to contain, store, or transport objects or materials and shall include bags designed for trash and garbage." The chapter grants no bulk, furniture or oversized-item exception to that requirement. The 24-hour clock "shall commence upon the placement of any article of trash, or garbage, refuse or tree or shrub trimmings", the culpability required is "recklessness as defined in Section 606.08", and - usefully for a resident whose hauler misses a week - "Failure of the sanitation hauler to timely collect any trash, garbage, refuse or tree or shrub trimmings shall not be a defense to a violation of this section." Section 1060.02(e) also forbids anyone except law enforcement from going through or rummaging through another person's trash left at the curb without permission. Section 1060.99 sets the price of getting it wrong: "Whoever violates any of the provisions of this chapter is guilty of a minor misdemeanor and shall be fined not more than $100 for each offense. A separate offense shall be deemed committed each day during or on which a violation occurs or continues." Section 1060.02 was built up by Ordinance 11-85, passed June 17, 1985, Ordinance 29-2011, passed December 19, 2011, and Ordinance 19-2014, passed November 17, 2014. The chapter cross-references trash and refuse haulers at Chapter 854, filthy accumulations at Section 660.04, littering at Section 660.03 and refuse in yards at Section 1490.14. The published code is the 2026 S-17 supplement, current through May 18, 2026. Source Not confirmed: The chapter does not say how a resident may lawfully set out an item that cannot be placed in a closed and secured container, and it never uses the word mattress or furniture. Not confirmed: Chapter 1060 contains no city collection program, no schedule and no rates, and the separate hauler chapter at Chapter 854 was not read, so the licensing terms a Shelby hauler works under are not established here.

• Primary names Harvard Avenue Transfer Station at 3227 Harvard Ave, Newburgh Heights OH 44105; district calls it Harvard Road at 3227 Harvard Road. Same number, city and operator support an identity candidate, but street suffix discrepancy retained. Source
• Hamilton municipal FAQ says transfer-station large-item intake Monday–Saturday. Existing Rumpke operator-locator staging record 07c7c0690194a830d775d57e lists Monday–Friday 8am–3:45pm at the same 1000 N Third Street address and phone 513-867-8661. This is an hours discrepancy, not grounds to merge unrelated branches. Source
• Ohio EPA Solid Waste Management District Locator (GIS app): select a county to see its Solid Waste Management District; the underlying layer covers all 88 counties. SWMDs are the local contact for recycling and disposal. Source
• Ohio EPA's "Where to Recycle" page names the three statewide tools it offers residents: the Ohio EPA Recycling Directory (a searchable directory of service providers who volunteered to be listed), the solid waste management district locator map, and the Ohio Materials Marketplace for businesses. It states that recycling and litter prevention activities are controlled locally through the county's solid waste management district, which "can help with information such as ... where to take hard to recycle items". Note the agency site now serves these pages under the /wps/portal/gov/epa/ path; the bare /divisions-and-offices/... URLs 404 when requested directly. Source
• The Ohio EPA Recycling Directory is hosted on RecycleSearch (Re-TRAC) and is searchable by free text or by pre-set material categories after setting a location. Its own text says results may include curbside recycling programs, drop-off recycling locations, reuse stores and other service providers, and that listing is not an endorsement. Its FAQ states the directory "is in the process of being populated" and that some areas of the state may have no information available, directing residents to their local solid waste management district instead. Listings are managed by Ohio EPA and the districts. Source
• No statewide mattress stewardship program or landfill ban found on Ohio EPA pages as of 2026-09-22; mattress disposal is handled by local governments and county solid waste management districts. The agency's own site search for "mattress" returns only 4 resources, none of them mattress-related (Revised Total Coliform Rule, Underground Injection Control, operator exam information and a Trauma Scene Clean-Up fact sheet). The Materials and Waste Management division pages cover solid waste, infectious waste, scrap tires and C&DD, with no mattress or bulky-item program. Source
• Mattress Recycling Council's Program States page names exactly four program states — California, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Oregon. Ohio is not among them, confirming there is no MRC-run mattress stewardship program or Bye Bye Mattress free drop-off network in Ohio. Source