Bury Bin Collection App: From Personal Hack to Community Tool

What started as a quick personal hack to keep track of my own bin collection dates evolved into a hopefully useful tool for the entire Bury Council area.

Link to the app https://awforsaken.github.io/Bins/

Example bury post code: BL9 0SW

The problem

To see what bins are going next i need to:

1. Go to Bury councils website

2. Go to bins and alerts(technically could book mark this mage to save first two steps)

3. Enter my postcode

4. Select address

5. Scan through the thing to find what is going next

It isn't end of the world but it is really annoying especially when returned page shows somehow both more and less information that needed

Solution

Make my own tracker which shows me what bins are coming out next. Design wise i intentionally kept it as simple as i could, writing all of css, html and JS by hand as a fun little exercise. This is what i ended up with, and journey how i got there is documented below. In adition i have added date navigation which allows you to see what bins will be collected on different dates

How it started

I built the first version of this app in literally one afternoon. I was annoyed about missing bin day and thought "I'll just make something myself." It was super basic with hardcoded collection dates because I never expected anyone but me to use it, and honestly, I had zero experience working with APIs at that point.

The "good enough"

The initial version worked great for what I needed. I could quickly check which bins were due next without having to dig through council website having to enter my postcode and choose address every time. But having only a limited number of dates hardcoded was getting annoying. I'd have to manually update it every few months, which felt like a waste of time.

Making it actually good

While on one of my too many internet sidequests, I stumbled across this repo called UKBinCollectionData that exposed APIs for council bin collections. I thought "wait, I could actually make my app properly useful instead of this hacky thing."

I had a bit of a wrestling match with Cloude explaining me the API, eventually I figured out how Bury Council's system worked. The more I looked at it, the more I realised that with just a few tweaks, I could make this work for anyone in Bury, not just for my address.

The upgrades were pretty straightforward once I understood the API:

• Set up the app to fetch real-time data from Bury Council's API.

• Added a postcode input so users could enter their own location. It sends off request to the councils API and returns addresses, selecting address then returns collection ID.

• Made the URL store a collection ID code so that it can be bookmarked.

The coolest part was making the app "bookmarkable" - after you put in your address once, you can just save it and never have to type it again.

The privacy bit

Since this was going from "just me" to "potentially lots of people," I wanted to make sure it wasn't creepy with data. The app is intentionally dumb - it doesn't store anything except in the URL for bookmarking. I added a SimpleAnalytics just so I could see if anyone was actually using it and on what devices, but nothing personally identifiable.

Key takeaways

• Less is more.

• APIs aren't as scary as I thought

The end result

What started as a quick afternoon project to solve my own annoyance with bury council website turned into something that (hopefully) makes life a tiny bit easier for other Bury residents.