The council will be reducing bulky waste costs hopefully by December.

The current flat rate is £42 for up to four items to £5 each. Mattresses will be reduced from £14 to £5 each and Fridge Freezers at £25 each instead of £60.

https://lewisham.gov.uk/articles/news/co...ion-charge

Thank you for posting this.

It's a great initiative - and makes a change for those in charge to try to make improvements at the root of the problem.

I hope they will have the budget to make this concession widely known so that people will see that it's going to be far cheaper to pay the council to dispose of their large items properly than to pay a fly-tipper-by-night cowboy to put it on their truck only for it all to be slung off around the corner.

Well done Lewisham!

This post was last modified: 24-10-2025 08:19 AM by Anotherjohn.

What they don't mention in the changes is that it used to be free to have a mattress collected - this now rises to £14. We can expect to see more mattresses dumped on the streets and in communal gardens as a result of this change.

I welcome the longer hours at weekends for taking items to the dump / recycling centre. I only wish it were not so far away.

But taking mattresses is difficult in a normal car or on the bus. Fortunately I only get rid of a mattress every 5-10 years but it will be far easier to leave it on the street and report it to the council than to pay £14. What are the chances that they will trace it back to me?

Quotes from the press release -

"just £5 per item including mattresses"

“Reducing our bulky waste collection to just £5 per item will make it cheap, easy and convenient for our residents to dispose of unwanted household items like mattresses and fridge freezers" (fridge-freezers quoted at £25, which is still cheap IMO)

And this is for the convenience of having it collected from outside someone's home.

you are right @anotherjohn it used to be free for the first mattress and then £14 for any others. Now it is £5 each. So cheaper if you are getting rid of multiple mattresses per year, but more expensive if you just want to get rid of one.

There remain some people in the community who would prefer to leave a mattress on the street than pay £5 to arrange collection and many residents will claim they don't know that there is a mattress collection service (free or not). I'm not surprised that people don't know as I only recently found out that I couldn't take paint pots to the recycling centre and had to contact City of London to arrange collection of two old tins of paint. The whole business of what you can and cannot recycle and where you can do it is a minefield.

The big improvement is opening the recycling centre on Saturday afternoons which makes it easier for those of us with access to a car to avoid the collection charges.

"many residents will claim they don't know that there is a mattress collection service (free or not)"

I totally agree Michael, which is why I wrote -

"I hope they will have the budget to make this concession widely known so that people will see that it's going to be far cheaper to pay the council to dispose of their large items properly than to pay a fly-tipper-by-night cowboy to put it on their truck only for it all to be slung off around the corner"

Coincidentally, another mattress was dumped outside the old Indian restaurant at 63 Dartmouth Road before the weekend and I've reported it to Fix My Street, as I do for other random fly-tips there on a regular basis. It would be great if Lewisham used their power to take control of the long-term disused shop and put it out to rent - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huge-...new-powers

This post was last modified: Yesterday 07:58 PM by Anotherjohn.