mcp-abfall

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MCP server for the waste collection calendars of German cities and districts. Looks up collection dates — residual waste, organic waste, paper, packaging, bulky waste, hazardous waste collection points — for a given address.

address ──▶ Nominatim ──▶ municipality + district ──▶ provider search (995)
                                                              │
                       collection dates ◀── portal ◀── resolve arguments

Why this is not trivial

Waste management in Germany is organised municipally. There is no nationwide API — roughly 400 public waste authorities each run their own portal, backed by a handful of software platforms (Abfall.IO/AbfallPlus, AbfallNavi, Jumomind, AWIDO, C-Trace, Müllmax, plus many plain ICS exports).

This server uses mampfes/hacs_waste_collection_schedule (MIT) as its data source — an actively maintained project with over 950 source modules. Its inner package is independent of Home Assistant and is wired in here as a Git submodule.

The actual work of this project is turning an address into the responsible waste authority and its internal parameters. In Home Assistant a human clicks that together once; an MCP server has to do it on its own.

Installation

The server runs from a repository checkout, not as an installed package: it needs the data source under vendor/ and the registry under data/, both resolved relative to the project root. That is also why it is not on PyPI — a wheel would install cleanly and still not work.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/AlpayC/mcp-abfall.git
cd mcp-abfall
uv sync
uv run pytest

data/providers.json is checked in, so the server starts right away. After a submodule update, rebuild it:

uv run python scripts/build_registry.py

Wiring it up

Locally over stdio — in claude_desktop_config.json or .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "abfall": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/path/to/mcp-abfall", "run", "mcp-abfall"]
    }
  }
}

As an HTTP service:

uv run mcp-abfall --http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Keep in mind that every HTTP request puts load on the authorities' portals and on Nominatim. For anything beyond personal use, put a cache in front and your own Nominatim instance behind it (MCP_ABFALL_NOMINATIM_URL).

Tools

Tool names and responses are German, because the domain and the users are.

Plus the resource abfall://traeger with the full list of authorities.

Asking beats guessing

When a value cannot be determined unambiguously, the server returns status: "rueckfrage" along with the concrete list of options instead of guessing. That is deliberate: a wrongly guessed town cheerfully returns the neighbouring municipality's calendar — a wrong answer that looks like a right one.

Coverage, measured

scripts/build_registry.py collects 995 waste authorities from 150 source modules.

scripts/smoke.py queries real addresses against the real portals. A run over 21 addresses across Germany (as of Aug 2026):

That is the measured number, not an estimate — and the reason to state it here: "covers every German city" is true of the authority list, not of fully automatic resolution from a bare address.

Authorities with their own ID lookup

Some portals require internal identifiers that cannot be derived from an address. For these, the portal's address dialog is reimplemented in lookup.py:

The upstream wizard for Hamburg is stale by now — the portal moved its form to a JavaScript component, whose address endpoint is read out of the page here.

Where the remaining cases fail

• Further ID arguments with no lookup path: standort in Dresden, idHouseNumber in Leipzig, streetnr in Stuttgart. One more resolver each, following the same pattern as the three above.
• Portals using different spellings that ship no list of suggestions (Erfurt, Kiel).
• Outages, rate limiting and malformed responses on the authorities' side (Saarbrücken returns HTML instead of ICS).

Layout

The registry is not built at runtime: data/providers.json is produced by a script so that starting the server does not import 150 modules. Rebuild it after a submodule update.

Data sources and usage

Collection dates come from the portals of the respective waste authorities, address resolution from Nominatim (OpenStreetMap). Nominatim has a usage policy — at most one request per second; the server honours it and caches results in ~/.cache/mcp-abfall/.

For dates something depends on (bulky waste, hazardous waste collection), it is worth checking the portal address that every response carries.

Contributing

The most useful contribution is a report that some authority does not work — there is an issue template with the right questions. How to add an authority resolver is in CONTRIBUTING.md; security issues belong in a private report, see SECURITY.md. Changes are listed in the CHANGELOG. Agents working on this repository should read AGENTS.md.

One principle runs through the whole project and applies to contributions too: when in doubt, ask — do not guess. A wrongly guessed town cheerfully returns the neighbouring municipality's calendar — a wrong answer that looks like a right one.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The submodule vendor/hacs_waste_collection_schedule is under its own MIT license, Copyright (c) 2020 Steffen Zimmermann — this repository only references it, it does not ship the code. Third-party attributions are collected in NOTICE.