What this map is made of, and what you may do with it.

The licence, in both directions

The disposal data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence 1.0 (ODbL). What we publish here is a Derivative Database of it — re-ranked, de-duplicated, audited for provenance — and ODbL's share-alike term means we owe you the same freedom we were given. So we say it plainly:

We are not asking you to pay us, sign anything, or ask permission. We are asking you to pass it on. A map of this kind only works if the next person can build on it, which is the entire reason OpenStreetMap chose this licence and the reason we did not try to wriggle out of it.

What we will not take from others

There are other people mapping bins in Japan, some of them volunteers running small community sites. Their points are not on this map and will not be, unless they offer them. A coordinate is a fact and facts are not owned — but copying somebody's whole collection into a competing product is taking their volunteers' work, and Japanese courts have awarded damages for exactly that even where no copyright existed. If you run such a site and want to share in both directions, the door is open.

We also do not send anyone to a convenience store bin to dispose of something they did not buy there. That bin is for what the shop sold you; carrying rubbish in is treated as illegal dumping, and chains are pulling bins indoors because of it.

If you contribute a photo or a note

You keep the copyright in your photo. By adding it you give everyone a licence to use it as part of this map — CC BY-SA 4.0 — which is the same bargain the map itself runs on. Only add photos you took yourself. Do not photograph people, faces, or vehicle plates; the app strips location metadata before anything is stored, and photos wait in a review queue before they appear.

What we deliberately left out

Residential collection points (ごみステーション) are published as open data by several cities. They are not on this map and never will be: they belong to the households on that street, they are only out on collection mornings, and using one as a visitor is fly-tipping.

Municipal "resource collection box" datasets are also excluded. They are real, well-licensed and precisely located — and they collect milk cartons, foam trays, batteries and small appliances. Nothing a traveller is carrying.

Privacy

There is no account and no sign-in. Your location is used by your browser to centre the map and is never sent to us. Your answers to "was the bin there?" are stored on your own device and, if you choose to share them, travel without anything that identifies you. We do not have a user table, because we do not have users — we have a map.