Where Is the Nearest Recycling Container for Paper

This week a colleaque of mine wanted to know where the nearest recycling container for paper is. Luckily, I was able to help him :)

This is a typical query for geo databases. But which database has such items included? Yes, Openstreetmap is our friend here. You can find nearly everything in this geo database (even excrement bags for docs, in German “Hundekottütenspender”). Most of you only know the rendered view of the data on the webpage. But Openstreetmap is more, much more. Search the OSM wiki to get an impression.

In our example searching the wiki leads to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Drecycling . This page states that we are looking for objects with the tag “amenity” and value “recycling”. In detail we are looking for tag “recycling:paper” and value “yes”. On the page http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=recycling you can see in addition that “recycling:paper” is used very often in the recycling context.

Now, we need a tool to search for these objects. Here Overpass comes into play http://overpass-turbo.eu/. On this webpage you can query for any object you need. The following query gives us all recycling containers for paper in the area shown on the map.

node
  ["amenity"="recycling"]["recycling:paper"="yes"]
  ({{bbox}});
out;

For a real life example see, http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/aAN (click the “run” button).

This is only a very small example. But it shows how powerful the tools are and how detailed the data of Openstreetmap is.