TrashAlert Now Covers 5M+ Addresses Across 10+ US Cities
What started as a side project for one neighborhood in San Diego now serves over 5 million addresses coast to coast. Here's the journey — and where we're headed next.
From "When Is My Trash Day?" to a National Platform
Every city in America has the same problem: people don't know when trash day is. They move to a new house, the schedule changes for a holiday, or they just forget. The result? Missed pickups, overflowing bins, and that walk of shame dragging your trash can back from the curb a day late.
TrashAlert started in San Diego's University Heights neighborhood — one person building a tool to look up their own trash day. The data existed on city websites, but it was scattered, hard to find, and never adjusted for holidays automatically.
Today, we're live in 10+ cities with 5 million+ addresses and growing every week.
The Cities
Our live coverage now spans coast to coast:
Plus beta coverage in Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, and Jersey City — with more cities joining every month.
How We Get the Data
Every city publishes trash collection data differently. Some have clean Socrata APIs (New York). Some bury it in ArcGIS portals (Houston, Phoenix, Denver). Some have nothing at all and rely on community reports (San Francisco neighborhoods).
TrashAlert doesn't guess or use AI to generate schedules. We source directly from official city open data portals and municipal GIS systems. When a city updates their routes, we re-pull from the source.
Our pipeline handles the complexity so you don't have to:
- Address geocoding via US Census and city-specific geocoders
- Spatial queries to match addresses to collection zones
- Holiday adjustments that shift pickup days automatically
- Recycling week tracking (Week A vs Week B in biweekly cities)
Free Reminders That Actually Work
The core product is simple: enter your address, get your schedule, set a reminder. We email you the night before trash day with exactly what to put out — including whether it's a recycling week.
It's free. No account required. One-click unsubscribe. We built this because we needed it ourselves.
For households that want more, we're building TrashAlert Pro — SMS reminders, multiple addresses, custom reminder times, and household sharing. Join the waitlist →
The API
Behind the consumer product is a REST API that any developer can use. One call returns the complete collection schedule for any address in our coverage area:
{
"found": true,
"schedule": {
"collection_day": "Mon, Wed, Fri",
"recycling_week": "Fri",
"district": "MN05"
},
"organics_day": "Wed",
"bulk_day": "Mon, Wed, Fri"
}The free tier gives you 100 lookups/day with no API key required. Property platforms, smart home integrations, and municipal apps can upgrade for higher limits. See API pricing →
What's Next
We're not slowing down. Here's what's on the roadmap:
- Mobile app — iOS and Android with push notification reminders
- More cities — targeting the top 50 US metros by end of 2026
- Smart sensors — IoT bin sensors that know when your trash was collected
- Calendar integration — auto-add pickup days to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar
- Community features — missed pickup reports, bin condition tracking
Try It
Look up your address at trashalert.io — it takes 5 seconds. If we don't cover your city yet, request it and we'll prioritize it.
TrashAlert is built by TombStone Dash LLC — a small team solving everyday problems with open data and good engineering.