recycleyourelectricals.org.uk – great data, terrible search

So the local council made a facebook post recommending https://recycleyourelectricals.org.uk/ to find recycling points near you.

And it’s useless because when I search for my postcode it finds two shops in the city centre which are a half-hour busride each way, and then starts listing council locations which are vehicle only and miles away so I didn’t look any further and assumed it was kinda useless.

But on a whim I looked a few pages more and actually it’s full of great data but they’ve fixed certain results to appear first, rather than sort by distance and with only 5 results a page and each result being huge (I have to scroll twice on my laptop to read those 5 results) most people won’t get any use out of it. Oh, and there’s also no map of results, just maps of each individual item. I can’t link to a record as it’s all javascript and doesn’t use fragments for deep linking.

Interestingly the funding is from a fund electrical manufacturers are required to contribute to if they don’t recycle enough and that is administered by a non-profit. So I’m writing this blog post in the hope they’ll make some improvements.

The next big complaint is that this isn’t open data. As it’s not tax-payer funded I guess it’s a choice, but it’s a bad one. 

But it’s on the web and I have AI on my side so ChatGPT worked out their website API and made me a neat python script to turn it into a KML map file which I could then upload to google maps.

So I used AI for this…

The script took about an hour to get right. I’ve uploaded it to github. I think it’s worth mentioning a couple of things here…

Firstly is that using AI to do something like this is different to using a chatbot. It is a process and requires skill. It’s force multiplier, like a power tool. If you don’t know what you’re doing it just let’s you go wrong faster. This task it can do quite easily, with a little guidance as each part of it is a well trodden pattern. We’re not inventing anything new here. 

And second is that there’s concerns around the modern AI for both ethics and environmental reasons. I’ve no problem with my code being used to train it, and most of what I’ve ever written is available online under an open license. I do wonder if the fact that AI was clearly trained on GPL code means technically everything it produces should be GPL… but I Am Not A Lawyer. The environmental issue is interesting as we all use AI non-consentually now everytime we do a Google search (remember when google had a minimalist thing going on?) , and my understanding is that the energy use of me using this tool for an hour is probably lower than watching Netflix for an hour, although it’s hard to know for sure.

Suggestions for recycleyourelectricals.org.uk:

• Make the search results viewable on a map
• Allow such a map to be embedded in iframes so that local councils can use it in their websites
• Make the search results more compact and show more than 5 results per page
• Make the search sort by distance. I assume there’s some politics that put the places which recycle the most in the first few pages of links but the result is that all the local locations are obscured. You have great data, but are not using it well.
• Publish the data under an open license. The wider this information is shared, the more you achieve your goals. It does make it harder to measure, but that’s not a good enough reason. Making it easy to reuse from a simple API also means anybody down stream can keep it up to date automatically, and that local councils etc could use your info and save the tax payer money without harming your campaign, but rather benefitting it.
• Make the pages for each location into actual linkable pages, not just javascript popups (this is less important, but just annoys me).

Thanks for listening. I hope this was helpful. If they implement any improvements I’ll add an update to this post.