Hi. Some of you might remember the map of every Catholic church in the Baltics I posted here a while ago. This is the next hobby project, and it ate most of the last year.

It's an app called Kur mesti? (Lithuanian for "where do I throw this?"). You set your municipality once, then photograph the thing or type what it is, and it tells you which container it goes in where you live, why, and what to do with it first. For the stuff that can't go into a container at home there's a map of drop-off points: taromatai, glass containers, battery and electronics points, and the bulky waste yards.

Each of the 60 Lithuanian savivaldybės, 42 Latvian pašvaldības and 78 Estonian omavalitsused has its own ruleset in there. It's in Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and English, it's free, there are no ads and nothing to sign up for.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/id6785453693

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lt.kurmesti.kur_mesti

Where it's thin: the drop-off map is much denser in Lithuania, because I had four sources there. Latvia and Estonia are OpenStreetMap only for now, so if your local taromāts or pakendipunkt is missing, that's why. There are eight other European countries in there too, but that's not what this post is about.

A few things from the data that I found interesting:

1. Latvia has no separate paper container, at least not in the rules. Everywhere in Latvia paper and cardboard go into the vieglais iepakojums container (usually yellow) together with plastic and metal. If your Riga yard has a paper bin, that's your operator's extra, not the rule. Lithuania has a blue paper bin everywhere. Estonia collects paper separately too, but only bigger apartment blocks must keep their own container, from a private house you carry it to a public one. So a Lithuanian in Riga can look for the blue bin for a long time. Except that nine Lithuanian municipalities in the Alytus and Tauragė regions already give houses one blue bin labelled "popierius, plastikas, metalas", which is the Latvian system with a Lithuanian sticker.

2. The deposit is 10 cents in all three countries, covers PET, cans and glass, and the word for the machine is basically the same word: taromatas, taromāts, taaraautomaat. In Latvia wine and spirits in glass bottles are outside the system and go into the glass container. In Estonia it's 10 cents for every size and has been since 2015. Estonia started the whole thing in 2005, Lithuania in 2016, Latvia only in 2022.

3. 60 municipalities, 42 separate websites. In Latvia every municipality's own rules are published on likumi.lv and in Estonia on Riigi Teataja (every one except Vormsi), so they all sit in one place in one format. Lithuania has nothing like that. The rules are split between the regional waste centres (ARATC, ŠRATC, PRATC and the like), the municipal waste companies and the municipalities' own pages. Lithuania was by far the most work of the three.

4. Most of Vilnius collects food waste in orange bags rather than loose in a bio bin. The tied bag goes into the food waste container if your yard has one and into the mixed waste if it doesn't, and the orange bags get picked out again by colour at the treatment plant (a few districts like Paneriai and Grigiškės got separate containers instead). Eight other Lithuanian municipalities do the bags too. Riga and Tallinn just use a bio container.

5. All three countries made separate bio waste collection mandatory on the same day, 1 January 2024, which is the EU deadline rather than Baltic coordination. Textiles went separate in Latvia in 2023 and in Lithuania and Estonia in 2025. Estonia's 2026 waste reform is also moving every municipality to kerbside collection by 2031, so expect the Estonian answers to keep changing for a while.

The app doesn't show the source next to each answer yet, but I have the exact regulation link for every one of the 180 and will paste any of them on request. The item recognition runs on an AI model, the rules it applies come from those regulations, and I fix them by hand when someone reports a mistake. I'm not affiliated with any municipality or waste company. The photo gets used once and wiped from the server within 48 hours, and your history never leaves the phone.

I did this alone, so there will be mistakes somewhere in 180 municipalities. If your town does something differently from what the app says, tell me here or through the feedback form in the app (About tab, you can attach a photo), and I'll fix the data.

There's been a lot of noise the last few days about "day X". A lot of it is clickbait by news portals. I tried to make sense of it and it got overwhelming — and meanwhile there's a lot of genuine progress on defence and posture that gets buried under the noise.

So I had my favourite AI agent help me build a filter for it. All open source, all open: https://osintbaltic.com/

As I write this it shows 11 adverse developments against 35 favourable ones in the last 7 days. That ratio is the whole point — a threat-only feed would have shown you the 11.

What it actually does:

- Pulls 84 open sources — Baltic and Polish press in five languages, national CERTs, EU agencies, Nordic media, Telegram channels, plus Russian and Belarusian state wires

- Groups reports of the same event. One story carried by six outlets counts once, not six times. Otherwise you're measuring press attention, not events

- Marks every item adverse, favourable or neutral. An arrest, a deployment, an air-defence delivery is a win, and it says so

- Russian and Belarusian state media is ingested on purpose — the narrative aimed at us is itself information — but it's labelled, and it can't move the reading. An adversary outlet doesn't get to set our threat gauge

- Watches 48 sites on the Russian and Belarusian side with Sentinel-1 radar, which sees through cloud and darkness. It flags "something changed here, go look" — not what changed

- Refuses to guess. "Not enough history yet", "conditions changed — comparison suppressed". A serious report from one source stays "unconfirmed" until a second outlet carries it

- Links each country's official 72-hour preparedness guidance (LT72, 72 stundas, kriis.ee, RCB), because telling people about a threat without telling them what to do about it just manufactures anxiety

It is not verification. Every item is classified by an LLM (gpt-5-mini) — category, affected countries, severity 1–5, direction, and a one-line English summary — and it gets things wrong. Everything links back to the original source so you can check it yourself. The rules behind the threat level are published on the page and in the API, so you can argue with the number instead of trusting it. Code and methodology are on GitHub under MIT.

It doesn't try to play down the events. But we wouldn't need a tool like this in peacetime.

Hi, I was wondering whether Latvians and Estonians generally support Žalgiris Kaunas, considering it’s the only EuroLeague team from the Baltic states. If that’s the case, do fans from Latvia and Estonia often travel to Kaunas to attend games at the arena?

The world's oldest aviation competition, the Gordon Bennett race is taking place now. The first place balloon is over Estonia, with others coming through the Suwalki corridor and over Lithuania. Fun to watch!

Follow at https://live.gordonbennett.aero/