bromley-veolia-recycling-pickups

2021-05-21 NB: It looks like Bromley have changed backend provider - this may not work at the moment!

What?

Downloads the property pickup date information from the Bromley/Veolia service site and parses it into JSON for use downstream (e.g. for a Home Assistant panel, a WhatsApp/Telegram bot, IFTTT etc.)

Why?

The printed calendars provided by the council work well when there is no distruption, but there has been recently, and the Veolia site is accurate - this software converts it into a machine-readable format for further processing.

Basically, it tells you which bins to put out, and uses the most accurate source information.

Requirements

node (to run node.js app)

wget (to download the property info page)

find (to check how old the local cache is)

bash (to orchestrate the above)

npm (to get node.js dependencies from package.json)

Configuration

copy config.json.example to config.json

set propertyid to the ID from the URL on the bromley/veolia site after you have searched for your address.

Search for your address here: https://recyclingservices.bromley.gov.uk/ and it will forward you to a page.

e.g. if you lived in Chislehurst Caves, the URL is:

https://recyclingservices.bromley.gov.uk/property/100020421898

and the propertyid is: 100020421898

Running

The script main.sh will download the file into source.html and pass this filename into main.js.

If the file already exists and is less than a day old it will not re-download it.

Example Output

[
  { name: 'Paper and cardboard', next: '15/05/2020' },
  { name: 'Non-recyclable refuse', next: '15/05/2020' },
  { name: 'Green Garden Waste (Subscription)', next: '14/05/2020' },
  { name: 'Food waste', next: '15/05/2020' },
  { name: 'Plastic, glass and tins', next: '22/05/2020' }
]