In city where you can walk around the street and pick up some amazing goods others are just throwing away, there isn't a centralized place where people can find where, what and when trash and recylables are being collected. The closest,the Department of Sanitiation website which allows a search specific to a building address.

NYC Treasure Finder aggragates a collection schedules for trash and recycling borough by borough, neighborhood by neighborhood down to each zip code. Results are ranked user "+" and "-" votes and census data including average HH income, average monthly rental values in order to give useful meaning to array of options to chose from.

Setting out to find treasures amongst trash is an imprecise effort and NYC Treasure Finder aims to work within that reality. The use of zip codes, while not mapping exactly with either the census data or Sanitation Department collection zones, are an approximate and useful starting point from which people can use to start looking and expect to find something of value to them. Since collection schedules may differ within a given zip code, users may submit zip their own addresses, or ones they find, to the website and the site will include that schedule once verified.

All in all, the NYC Treasure Finder is meant to be a useful starting point for people looking to find valuables and recyclables. To the extent people are interested, the service grows in accuracy and usefulness.