TrashDayNow
Your trash pickup day, by street address, US and Canada
I have spent the summer on a boring question: what day is trash pickup at a given street address. Most sites guess a citywide day. Cities actually publish routes in map layers, per-address calendars, PDFs and contractor apps, and the day depends on your street.
TrashDayNow (https://www.trashdaynow.com) reads the city's own source for the exact address and shows that source beside the answer. If it cannot verify an address, it says so.
The number I care about is not "cities covered". It is the share of rooftops that get an exact day when you type a real address. I keep a fixed panel of homes across the largest cities, run them through the site, and count. Today: about 36% of US rooftops, about half of Canadian ones. Every adapter added moves it in fractions of a point, which is humbling.
A few things learned along the way:
- A hauler having a contract in a town is not the same as the town being covered. Counting it that way inflated my number by ten points once.
- Holiday weeks are where the interesting data is. Every city guide now shows the city's published rule and what address checks actually saw last Labor Day. The rules for 63 cities are open data (CC BY-NC): https://github.com/bineyamtsegaye1-cyber/trashdaynow-holiday-rules
- Tuesday is trash day for 22% of homes, and people check the evening before.
Solo, bootstrapped, built with Claude Code, on Vercel and Neon. Free for residents, no account, addresses never stored with feedback.
If you try your own address and it is wrong or missing, tell me the city. That is how coverage grows.
5 Comments
The rooftop coverage metric is much more useful than a city-count metric, especially after you found the 10-point overstatement. Do you see users coming back across different weeks or holidays once their address works, or is coverage still the main thing you’re trying to validate?
Honestly, not yet. Return visits are under 1%, and the only "come back" path is a calendar feed only 2% of visitors use. Demand does return on its own: lookups tripled the week of Labor Day. People re-ask the question every holiday, they just re-ask Google, not me.
Coverage is validated enough. When the address works, the answer is right and sourced. The open question is whether people want to be told before the holiday instead of looking it up during it.
The gap between repeated demand and proactive use is the interesting part. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?
Agreed, that gap is the whole question right now. Happy to talk properly; the contact page on the site reaches me directly.
I checked the site, but I’m not seeing a contact form or email on the contact page. Is there another address you prefer I use?