How BinWeek gets and checks its data
Where the information on this site comes from, how a live lookup works, and what we do when something goes wrong.
Two kinds of information
Council pages explain a council’s bins: colours, what goes in each one, how often, Christmas changes, missed bins and tips. Lookups answer “what is my next collection?” for one address. They work differently, so we treat them differently.
Council pages: sourced, dated, in our own words
- We start from the council’s own pages (found through GOV.UK) and national policy from GOV.UK and Defra. Every fact is stored with the page it came from and the date we read it, and each page shows those sources.
- We write facts in our own words. Council web copy belongs to the council; GOV.UK content is reusable under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- If we cannot find a fact we leave it out. We never fill a gap with a guess.
- A tool re-reads each council’s source pages no more than weekly, using conditional requests, an honest user agent and the site’s
robots.txt. A changed page is reviewed by a person before we change ours. - The “last checked” date on a page is the oldest date among the facts it shows. Pages older than 120 days are taken out of search results until they are re-checked.
A page only appears in search engines when it passes an automatic check: at least two bin types with what goes in and what does not, a collection frequency, a food waste statement, a missed-bin route, the council’s link, at least two sources, recent checking and enough council-specific text. Pages that do not pass stay usable but are kept out of search.
Live lookups: only when you ask
- We ask a council’s website for your dates only when you submit your own address. We do not scrape in bulk or run scheduled sweeps.
- Results are kept briefly so the same address is not requested again straight away. They hold no address text.
- Each council has a limit on how often we may ask, and a breaker that stops us asking after repeated failures. A council can ask us to stop and we do, the same day.
- We identify ourselves honestly (see for councils) and we never try to get round bot protection. A council that blocks us becomes link-only.
- If a council does not answer, we may show the last result we have, clearly labelled with the date. If we have nothing, we say so and link to the council.
- The council’s own label for each bin is always shown beside ours, and the council has the final say on your collection day.
Coverage: which councils have a live lookup
There are 296 collection authorities in England. Live lookups are switched on one council at a time, only after the lookup has been tested against recorded examples and checked politely against the real site. Today 1 council has a live lookup, 200 are planned and 95 are link-only.
Link-only means we send you to the council’s own bin day page. The reasons, as we found them on 2 October 2026 (some may change when we re-test):
| Reason | Councils |
|---|---|
| Its bin day finder needs a full web browser | 81 |
| Publishes calendars rather than an address lookup | 6 |
| No way to read its bin day finder yet | 4 |
| Its website turns away automated requests | 3 |
| Its website asks automated tools to stay away | 2 |
| Would need us to pretend to be a browser | 1 |
Everything is browsable on the A to Z of councils, with each council’s lookup status.
Credits and licences
- Live lookups use the open-source UKBinCollectionData project (MIT licence), whose maintainers ask people to respect councils’ infrastructure and use it at a sensible frequency. We follow the spirit of that request: on demand, cached, rate-limited.
- Council names, codes and boundaries: Office for National Statistics, Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right.
- Policy summaries: GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Postcodes: postcodes.io.
Something wrong?
Tell us on the contact page. We will check it against the council’s own page and fix ours.