Arbiter Hacks V1 · Rethinking Waste
Which bin? Only what your council's own list says.
Sorting rules change from city to city, and a model that guesses sends the wrong things to the wrong bin. BinRules answers from the council's official list, shows the exact entry it used, and says "not covered" when the list is silent.
Official item names answered right. BinRules against the same model alone, 195 Brisbane questions.
Wrong answers on messy phrasing (slang, typos, brand names). 136 questions I wrote before tuning.
Items the list does not cover, refused. 67 questions with no official entry behind them.
Same Nemotron model on both sides. Brisbane test questions frozen before tuning. How I measured this, and where it fails
How an answer is made
The model matches words to entries. The bin always comes from the entry, never from the model.
1
The model reads your words
"Greasy box my pizza came in" becomes plain item names. It is never shown a bin.
2
Code finds official entries
A word index over the council's list pulls the closest entries. The list is the source, not the model's memory.
3
The model points, code decides
The model names the entry that is the same item, or none. Code checks the pick, reads the bins from the entry, and refuses if a check fails.
Where the rules come from
The list is the council's own open data. Entries are reformatted into JSON; the wording is not changed.
Brisbane, Australia
What goes in my bin (Brisbane City Council open data)
294 entries · updated 2026-07-20 · CC BY 4.0, credit Brisbane City Council