GarbageGrid - City Garbage Collection Patterns

I finally had a free weekend, and decided to work on some vis concepts. In this instance, I attempted to present data that is recorded on a daily basis. The visualisation is designed to more effectively identify patterns and anomalies at different time intervals (individual days, weeks, months, as well as years). It is like a yearly planner, but dates are aligned vertically by day of week rather than day of month.

To showcase this concept, I also needed to pick a real dataset to work with, which the drawing function will use to generate the grid on the fly (might take a couple of seconds to load below). After browsing through some public datasets, I decided to use garbage collection data for the city of Ballarat, Australia. You can grab the dataset in various formats here (I truncated the dataset for demonstration purposes as browsers on mobile devices might take too long to process 15 years of data).

Each square below corresponds to a garbage collection day. Vertical lines segment each month into weeks (start of each segment is a Monday). Hopefully which day of the month/year each square corresponds to is fairly intuitive. The colour of the square indicates how much garbage (in tonnes) was collected, with the legend providing a general colour guide using five number summaries from box plot analysis. Basically, the greener a square is, the more garbage was collected on that day by the council. You can also mouseover specific days to see exact collection tonnage for that day. Finally, gaps indicates days where no garbage collection took place, or it wasn't recorded.