collections

🗑️ Reading Bin Collections MCP Server

An MCP-compliant tool for fetching household waste collection dates from Reading Borough Council.
Built for seamless integration with Claude.

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🔧 What it Does

This MCP server allows you to ask questions like:

“What are my bin collections for 51 Gosbrook Road, RG48BN?”

…directly within Claude. It looks up the postcode and house number via Reading Borough Council's API and returns your upcoming collection dates.

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🚀 Quickstart

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/vaughanc/collections.git

2. Install UV

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Make sure to restart your terminal afterwards to ensure that the uv command gets picked up.

3. Create a virtual environment

uv init collections
uv venv                                                   
source .venv/bin/activate
uv run fastmcp install --with uvicorn --with requests collections.py

The install command will create the config for Claude to detect the MCP server.

You can check this in the following file

cat  ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json 
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Reading Bin Collections Tool": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "--with",
        "fastmcp",
        "--with",
        "requests",
        "--with",
        "uvicorn",
        "fastmcp",
        "run",
        "/Users/chris/Documents/Code/collections/collections.py"
      ]
    }
    }
  }

When you start Claude you should see the following

📬 API Behind the Scenes

This tool makes two key requests:

1. Get address UPRN

Endpoint: https://www.reading.gov.uk/api/address-search Params: postcode Use: Resolves a UPRN for a given street/postcode.

2. Fetch collection schedule

Endpoint: https://www.reading.gov.uk/api/bin-collections Params: uprn Use: Retrieves bin types and dates (recycling, food waste, domestic, etc.)

📸 Screenshots

I used this quickstart guide to provide the background to get going.

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/server

I also may have used brew to resolve some dependencies such as NPM but can't recall.

https://brew.sh/