BinWeek and council websites

BinWeek is a bin day finder. When a visitor gives us their own address, our lookup bot visits the council’s bin day service on their behalf, reads the next collection dates and shows them, so the visitor does not have to find their way round the council’s site. BinWeek is independent and is not run by or affiliated with any council.

The bot runs only when a visitor asks for their own address, and then keeps the answer for about a day. We do not crawl, we do not sweep whole areas, and we do not run scheduled checks on councils that nobody has asked about.

How we identify ourselves

Our requests say who we are:

BinWeek/1.0 (+https://binweek.co.uk/bots; contact bots@binweek.co.uk)

How we behave

• One request at a time per council, with a pause of at least two seconds between them.
• Results are kept so the same address is not asked for again for about a day.
• If a council’s site fails or slows, we back off, and after repeated failures we stop asking for a while and send visitors to the council’s own page.
• We read each site’s robots.txt and do not use a lookup it asks automated tools to avoid. We do not get round bot protection.

To change or stop it

Write to bots@binweek.co.uk. A request to stop is honoured the same day, and the council stays link-only until you tell us otherwise. If you already publish a feed or an API, we would much rather use it.