Thanks for the article! That is certainly one way to handle it.

Funnily enough, we had a garbage collection problem in Sofia around October 2025. So it looks like we have been working on similar problems in parallel :)

Our mess is a little bigger since colours here don’t have the same meaning. Some operators use 3 colours system (green + yellow + blue as in Estonia) while others use 2 colours system (green + yellow, paper goes in the yellow).

We needed counts of different containers. The mixed waste containers got count=[number] but the colourful recycling ones were a bit harder. So I came up with count=[total count] + count:yellow=[number] + count:green=[number] + count:blue=[number].

Based on this schema I made a plugin for ED (https://plugins.every-door.app/sofia_waste_recycling_plugin, requires version 8.0+). Essentially it gives you a field for operator, one for total count and one for each colour. The count information is displayed in a separate overview (see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/topic/136856/5).

The last part was applying the recycling:* tags. My goal was to automate this process since it was very annoying. Thankfully with some LLM support I managed to build a bot which handles everything - https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/topic/136856/19.

I’m not saying it is the best approach but it is the one which worked here. It would be interesting to see if anyone else has had the same problem and came up with another solution :)

The new search functionality seems great! Assuming that you are running your own Nominatim instance, is it possible to make it work with road relations (like osm.org/relation/17031856) so it shows the whole street and not it’s 100 members? waterway relations are already shown, I assume that it won’t be a very hard task.

https://osmybiz.osm.ch is the editor that your are looking for.