Bin Day

Hackney Council collects household and garden waste on alternating weeks, something my brain finds incredibly hard to keep track of. To make matters worse (for me) they also change the collection date from time to time to even out the service during bank holidays. The outcome is that I need to check what is being collected every single week.

This doesn't sound too frustrating until you visit the council website to check your collection day and a required to: hit a 'check you collection' button, enter your postcode (remember the space!) and then select your properly from a dropdown list. Yes you can download an annual PDF (they don't post our printed copies anymore), but this is not the easiest to read, and also, how do you remember where you even saved that?!

Fortunately, hidden within the Azure app the runs the lookup service is a public API that returns details about your next collection without any authentication. You can actually get quite a bit of detail from the API, for example what bins are being collected on what day for the next 100 collections. However, all I need to know is whether it's garden or household waste this week and what date it's being collected. Recycling and food waste are collected every time.

This thing is completely useless to you unless you happen to live on my road or any of the surrounding roads that follow the same collection pattern. But... if you are interested in how it works, or recreating it yourself, you can check out my Bin Day code on Github.