Waste

Garbage is a daily chore for your city. Your sanitation crews collect it, then it needs somewhere to go: into your own landfill or out of town for a fee.

The amount grows with your population. Each citizen adds a fixed amount of waste per day, which includes a share of what shops, offices and public buildings throw away. Homeless citizens count for twice as much: managing waste is harder without a kitchen or storage. Helping people find housing also eases the load on your crews.

Collection

The Department of Public Works hires sanitation workers as the daily waste load grows. Its staffing target includes cover for weekends, illness and leave, so collections can run every day.

There is some breathing room: crews can still collect all the day’s garbage at 80% of the staffing target. Below that, they start leaving waste behind. The fewer workers you have, the more piles up on the streets, making citizens ill and hurting your approval rating. If garbage starts building up, check whether sanitation jobs are being filled. Once enough workers are back, the crews can catch up over the following days.

Exporting

A new city sends its collected garbage out of town through the Regional Waste Compact, an agreement to pay for disposal elsewhere. This lets you get started without building a landfill, but you pay for every ton you send away.

The Compact reviews its price every January. The usual increase doubles if you export more than three-quarters of your waste. Rely on it very little and the price falls instead. It can never fall below the starting rate or rise beyond a fixed ceiling.

A sudden jump in exports can also bring a bigger bill. The Compact updates its estimate of your daily exports once a month and allows you to send 25% more at the normal rate. Anything above that costs extra. Rapid growth or a big cleanup can push you over that allowance until the estimate catches up.

Keep enough money available to pay, too. If your treasury reaches its debt limit, the Compact stops accepting garbage. Anything your landfill cannot take stays on the street.

Landfills

Your own landfill costs less per ton than exporting, but you also pay for its upkeep every month. For a small town, that extra bill may outweigh the savings. As your city grows, a landfill becomes easier to justify. The city buries as much as the site can take each day and exports the rest.

Choose the site with care: nearby citizens dislike living beside a landfill. Every load also uses up space permanently. Plan for more room before it fills, or the garbage you used to bury will go back onto your export bill.

The bill

You pay for collection by the ton actually picked up, covering trucks, fuel and handling. In the budget report, Waste Management includes those collection costs, disposal fees and landfill upkeep. Your crews’ wages appear separately under Public Service Salaries, so remember to include both when working out what clean streets cost you.

The figures below show how much waste to plan for, how many workers it takes and the costs behind your bill.

Parameters

Waste collection cost ton

$566

Retired as a billing rate; kept because the split that replaced it must add up to it: COLLECTION_COST_TON (436) plus the Compact’s opening price, EXPORT_TIP_BASE (130), is 566, so a save from before the waste economy opens to the same first bill, and a test pins that identity. $566 is New York’s fully loaded refuse cost per ton in fiscal 2023, which DSNY splits as $344 collection (crews included) and $222 disposal; the game’s split is its own. DSNY counts short tons, so per metric ton the real figure is about $624.

Basis: measured

Source: NYC Mayor’s Management Report FY2024 — Department of Sanitation

Landfill density tons m3

0.8

Tons of compacted waste per cubic metre of landfill. EPA lists 1,200–1,700 lb per cubic yard for small, well-run landfills and 1,700–2,000 for large ones, 0.71–1.01 and 1.01–1.19 metric tons per m³; 0.8 is about 1,350 lb/yd³, the small-landfill end. It is the density behind LANDFILL_TONS_PER_TILE: 100 m² × about 20 m permitted height × 0.8 = 1,600 tons a tile, the airspace the Full-by date counts down.

Basis: measured

Source: US EPA — Volume-to-Weight Conversion Factors (April 2016)

Biogas kwh per ton

290

Electricity a biogas digester makes from a ton of sorted food waste. A plant in England’s Humber region turns 50,000 tons a year into 2 MW of electricity, running some 300 days a year: about 290 kWh a ton. A Portuguese plant built for 40,000 tons a year has 1.6 MW of engines, the same ratio.

Basis: measured

Sources: A Dynamical Model of the Industrial Economy of the Humber Region (arXiv:1404.3167); IEA Bioenergy Task 37, Food Waste Digestion: Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste for a Circular Economy (2018)

Sorted share paper

0.231

The share of household waste that is paper and cardboard: 23.1% of what Americans threw away in 2018. A home that sorts puts most of it in the paper bin.

Basis: measured

Source: US EPA — National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling (2018 data)

Sorted share plastics

0.122

The share of household waste that is plastic: 12.2% in 2018.

Basis: measured

Source: US EPA — National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling (2018 data)

Sorted share organics

0.337

The share of household waste that is food and garden waste: 21.6% food and 12.1% yard trimmings in 2018. What is left after paper, plastics and organics, about 31%, goes in the residual bin.

Basis: measured

Source: US EPA — National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling (2018 data)