Council coverage

Where Bin Night Tonight works today

Bin Night Tonight currently supports 180 local government areas across five Australian states: Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania. Each supported council either exposes a public address-lookup tool that we can query in real time, or publishes a structured schedule that we've imported and keep up to date.

Coverage is heaviest in Victoria, where the project started. We are progressively adding councils in other states as their waste-management systems mature and become reliable enough to query.

How we add new councils

Each council is added by hand. The work involves identifying the public waste-lookup endpoint or PDF source, writing an adapter that translates the council's response into a common format, mapping the council's postcodes to suburbs, and running an end-to-end test against a sample of real addresses.

Once an adapter is in place, we monitor it daily through automated audits. If a council changes the format of its data or moves to a new provider, the audit catches it and we update the adapter, usually within a week.

The councils that are hardest to add are those whose schedules are only available as printed PDFs or whose lookup pages require interactive multi-step forms. Those still get added, just more slowly.

Council platforms we work with

• Granicus. Used by around 42 Victorian councils. Provides a standard HTML lookup that returns the next collections for a given address.
• Recollect. A common platform across several states, with a JSON API that returns collection events.
• Custom council systems. Some larger councils (City of Melbourne, Wyndham City) run their own bespoke portals; we have dedicated adapters for each.
• PDF schedules. For smaller and rural councils where the only public format is a printed calendar, we keep curated schedule data and project it forward 52 weeks at a time.

A single live lookup may take half a second to two seconds depending on the council's system response time. We cache lightly to avoid burdening the underlying services.

If your council isn't listed

If you can't find your council, it's usually for one of three reasons:

• The council doesn't yet have a queryable online schedule. In that case, we can't add it until something changes on their end. You can request it via the contact page so we know there's demand.
• The council has a system but it's unreliable or returns inconsistent results. We don't add a council until we're confident the answers are right.
• The council is on our roadmap and we haven't got there yet. Most of these are in NSW, QLD, SA and TAS. We're working through them.

As an interim measure, your council's own website is the best source. The contact form is open if you want a heads-up when we add a particular council.

Full council list

The interactive list of all 180 supported councils is shown below this section once the page loads. Each council page lists the suburbs we have detailed coverage for and links to the council's official waste site for the source of truth.