Garbage disposal in Cities Skylines appears to be a much bigger issue than in real life. To tackle this troublesome issue, you’ll need to have good know-how of the service buildings that take care of garbage disposal.
Garbage disposal buildings in the game include landfills, incinerators, etc. These collect the garbage coming from garbage trucks. Let’s look at all the buildings related to the Garbage Disposal industry.
| Building | Cost | Capacity |
| Eco-Friendly Incinerator Plant | 50,000 | 500,000 |
| Floating Garbage Collector | 50,000 | – |
| Incineration Plant | 30,000 | 400,000 |
| Landfill Site | 4,000 | 8,000,000 |
| Recycling Center | 16,000 | 200,000 |
| Ultimate Recycling Plant | 750,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Waste Disposal Unit | 30,000 | 400,000 |
| Waste Processing Complex | 100,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Waste Transfer Facility | 20,000 | 250,000 |
How to deal with Garbage in Cities Skylines
There are different ways that you can follow to deal with garbage. You can build empty landfills once they are full or move the trash to another facility, like incinerators. Below, you will find all the tips to deal with garbage issues.
Fill and empty Landfills
Landfills are large areas of land where you can toss garbage out. However, they come as a City Service ‘building’ and are the most basic garbage disposal buildings in the game.
Each Landfill will have its number of garbage trucks that will go around to regions connected to the landfill via roads, collect garbage, come back, and dump it into the landfill.
However, you must be very careful with landfills since they have a limited capacity in Cities Skylines. Once they are filled up, landfills can be emptied. This consumes a surprisingly large amount of time, so you might want to consider emptying them when they are 80% full instead of 100%.
Landfills generally have a very low upkeep cost. However, they produce a lot of ground pollution, reduce the value of the land where they are placed, and can cause sickness to nearby citizens.
Build Incinerators
Incinerators are advanced garbage disposal buildings that have a dual purpose. Firstly, they act as your regular garbage disposal service building, dispatching garbage trucks to areas they are connected to.
However, instead of accumulating the garbage, Incinerators will burn it to produce electricity. Pretty handy, right? The downside is that Incinerators produce a lot of noise and air pollution, so you’ll have to place them far away from the main city.
Also, Incinerators tend to have a fewer number of trucks as compared to landfills and a much higher upkeep cost. Despite these downsides, placing a few Incinerators in your city will almost eliminate the garbage issues, which is an annoyingly serious problem in Cities Skylines.
You should only replace landfills with Incinerators when your population reaches around 20,000, and you have a profit of more than $15,000. This way, you’ll be able to pay the upkeep cost of the Incinerators and have enough garbage to produce a decent amount of electricity from these buildings.
Place Garbage Disposal buildings near an Industrial area
It’s better to place the Garbage Disposal Buildings near the industrial area and away from the residential property. This is because landfills and incinerators create a lot of ground pollution, noise, and air pollution, respectively.
Both of these near cities will make your citizens extremely sick, and even the best hospitals won’t be able to treat these ill citizens.
Fix Garbage not being collected in Cities Skylines
Several problems can cause garbage to be not collected when needed. Some factors can be transportation, while some are about the garbage disposal areas.
- If roads are not appropriately managed, there will be major traffic jams, which can hinder transportation. The best technique to tackle this issue is to create a six-lane, one-way road that travels around your main city and industrial zones.
- Make sure there is no traffic near residential areas so garbage can be collected easily.
- Once the city becomes too big and populated, it’s better to have multiple garbage sites. This can counter the limit of garbage trucks that one site can have to roam around the city.
- The number of garbage trucks can be increased if you shift the export-import focus to other vehicles like trains and ships. This can allow you to have more dedicated trucks.
- Keep an eye on the info panel to see if there is a need for a new landfill or incinerator. These things are sometimes ignored, so to prevent the process from stopping, keep checking them.
- Sometimes, when using mods, some bugs can appear. Restart your game or try to remove mods for a while to see if the problem persists.
To avoid garbage problems in Cities Skylines, you can implement the policies below.
- Pet Ban: Less garbage is accumulated, but it will increase unhappiness.
- Recycle Garbage: For Nature Reserve buildings, garbage collection decreases by 20%.
- Recycle Plastic: Better work efficiency by 20% at recycling buildings.
- Recycling: Less garbage accumulation.
