You might assume there's a national database of bin collection schedules somewhere. There isn't. Each of the UK's 400+ councils manages waste collection independently, and the data formats range from beautifully structured XML to "it's on page 47 of the annual report PDF."
The spectrum of data quality
At one end, you have councils with proper APIs and real-time route data. At the other, you have councils where the schedule is a laminated card pinned to the community centre noticeboard.
Most fall somewhere in between: a website with a postcode lookup, maintained by one person in the waste team who updates it when they remember.
Why we can't just scrape
Web scraping is fragile. One HTML change and your entire integration breaks. More importantly, scraping doesn't give us the relationship we need to handle edge cases — temporary route changes, vehicle breakdowns, or the annual chaos of Christmas collections.
The partnership approach
Instead, we work directly with each council's waste management team. We agree on a data format, set up a nightly sync, and build a feedback loop so they can flag changes before they happen.
It's slower than scraping, but it's reliable. And reliability is the entire point of BinPing.