CLIENT: Caerwen City Council🇬🇧United Kingdom

Binday - Bilingual Waste Collection Platform for a Welsh Council

Household Waste Collection Platform for a Welsh City Council

Designed and built a clickable operations console for a Welsh city council's household waste service: live rounds and fleet, missed bins checked against crew records and returned within SLA, round sequences with crew suggestions, and service alerts in Welsh and English.

Scope of Work
Product design, UI build and clickable demo
Industry
Waste & Circular Economy / Waste Collection
EnterpriseIoT
Compliance & Certifications
Environmental Protection Act 1990Controlled Waste Regulations 2012Waste (Wales) Measure 2010UK GDPRData Protection Act 2018Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018WCAG 2.2 AA

Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.

Impact

5 Screens
Clickable end to end

Dashboard, missed collections queue, rounds list, round detail with its sequence and route map, and live rounds and fleet. Every one of the 48 rounds opens its own detail page.

2 Working Days
Missed bin SLA on every report

Each report shows its return deadline and time left, amber under 24 hours and red when breached. A crew record of collected within 30 m, or not out with a photo, suggests not valid; the advisor decides.

Welsh First
Both languages, same prominence

A service alert cannot be posted without both Welsh and English text, and Welsh shows first. Every missed bin report carries the resident's language so the reply goes out in it.

48 Rounds
Realistic demo data

48 rounds across 5 streams, 9 running today, 20 vehicles with defects, 6 office staff and 38 crew, 24 missed bin reports and 7 unassigned jobs.

The Problem

Caerwen's residents found their bin day on a PDF calendar that went out of date every bank holiday and reported missed bins by phone, filling the contact centre every Tuesday morning. Crews carried printed round sheets and radioed the depot about contaminated or blocked bins, so the office could not tell a genuine miss from a bin that was not put out. Assisted collection lists lived in a spreadsheet crews rarely saw, and the quarterly return to the Welsh Government took a week to build.

Our Solution

Binday joins the council's waste service in one platform: a bilingual resident web app, an offline in-cab tablet for crews and an operations console. The build shows the console, where supervisors watch every round and vehicle live, check each missed bin against what the crew recorded at the stop, send returns to the nearest vehicle and publish round sequences with crew suggestions folded in.

The Challenge: One Service, Three Audiences, Two Languages

Caerwen City Council collects general waste, recycling, food and garden waste from about 110,000 households on 48 rounds from one depot. Residents, crews in the cab and office staff all need the same facts at the same time, under Welsh law and the council's own policies.

Genuine Misses or Not Out

Without crew records, every report looked the same. The office could not tell a missed street from a bin that was never put out or was left contaminated, so crews were sent back to stops they had already visited.

Welsh No Less Favourably Than English

Councils in Wales are generally subject to Welsh Language Standards under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. Every resident screen, notification and letter has to exist in both languages, and a resident's choice has to be remembered.

Health Data That Crews Must Not See

An assisted collection request usually reveals health or disability information, which is special category data under UK GDPR. Crews need to know where the bin is kept, but only the assisted collection officer may see why.

Rounds That Keep Changing

New estates, bank holidays, road closures and crew knowledge of the streets all change the order of a round. Sequences were edited on paper, and residents' bin days and the recycling figures for the Waste (Wales) Measure 2010 had to stay right.

Our Approach: From Council Rules to a Clickable Console

01

Spec and Rules Research

Mapped 10 roles, from resident and crew loader to the assisted collection officer, and 42 screens across the resident app, crew tablet and operations console. Defined the data model for properties by UPRN, rounds with versioned sequences, append-only crew events, missed reports, assisted collections, sensors and tonnages. Wrote down the rules the design follows: the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Controlled Waste Regulations 2012, the Waste (Wales) Measure 2010 and WasteDataFlow, UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, Welsh Language Standards and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018.

02

Clickable Demo on a Production UI Kit

Built 5 key operations screens on a production dashboard kit: the dashboard with KPIs, rounds progress and the bilingual service alert, the missed collections queue with its request panel, the rounds list, round detail with a numbered route map, sequence reordering into a draft and crew suggestions, and the live map of vehicles and unassigned jobs. Marking reports, sending jobs and publishing a sequence all run on local state.

03

What a Production Build Adds

Integration with Ordnance Survey AddressBase via GeoPlace and the OS Maps API, GOV.UK Pay or Civica Pay, GOV.UK Notify, vehicle telematics such as Webfleet or Samsara, bin sensors such as Sensoneo or Nordsense, weighbridge exports, WasteDataFlow uploads and the council CRM. Staff auth by role, an append-only audit log, and the remaining screens: the bilingual resident app, the offline crew tablet, calendar and bank holidays, assisted collections, sensors, contamination, fly-tipping, tonnages and settings.

Why It Works: Crew Records Behind Every Decision

Every Miss Checked Against the Stop

The request panel puts the resident's report next to the crew record, its time, photo and GPS distance from the property, plus previous misses at the address. Not valid needs a reason, which goes to the resident in their language.

Returns Go to the Nearest Vehicle

Valid misses and sensor jobs show as unassigned pins on the live map. A supervisor sends one to a vehicle already on a round for that stream, or bulk sends a round's misses at once.

Assisted Shows as a Flag Only

Round stops show Assisted collection beside narrow lane, dog on property or gated collection point, never the reason. Crews see only where the bin is kept; the health or disability reason stays with the assisted collection officer.

Sequence Changes Are Versioned

Supervisors reorder streets into a draft, approve or reject crew suggestions with their notes, and publish a new version with an effective date and the number of households affected. Earlier versions stay in the Changes tab.

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