Motivated by the problems in sensor networking, primarily the exploration versus exploitation tradeoff in data gathering, we propose a successive source coding scheme based solely on binning. The proposed scheme provides significant storage reduction compared to the conventional approach, without any rate loss. When specialized to the scalable coding with side information, our approach yields a unified encoding scheme for the settings where source $X $ and the side information variables ($Y_1, Y_2$) form Markov chain $X-Y_1-Y_2$ or $X-Y_2-Y_1$. The proposed scheme achieves the prior rate regions, while for the $X-Y_1-Y_2$ case, it suggests improvement. Finally, motivated by the Gray-Wyner network, we propose a new interpretation of scalable coding and demonstrate its benefits.