Waste

Waste in Microlandia is a daily flow, not a pile. Each citizen makes a fixed amount of solid waste per day. Homeless citizens make roughly double, because they have no kitchen or storage to consolidate their trash. The city is billed a fixed cost per ton collected and processed. That number covers labor, equipment, transport, and disposal in one line item. There is no landfill model. Collection and processing happen on the same daily charge.

Sanitation workers are hired through a dedicated public-works employer rather than being assigned per building, and the staffing target follows a simple ratio of workers per daily ton. Their monthly salaries land on the city’s waste budget on top of the per-ton collection cost. Both pull from the same line, so the waste budget is really one combined “collection plus payroll” budget.

Understaffing right now does not reduce collected tonnage in the simulation. The cost-per-ton is the dominant cost lever. But every sanitation job is also one fewer unemployed adult, which feeds into the crime model on the previous page, so a fully staffed sanitation department helps the rest of the city too.

Your room to maneuver

You cannot change how much waste a citizen makes, but you can change three other things:

How many citizens you have, through housing density and immigration.
How many of them are homeless, through shelters.
How much you pay per ton, by editing the cost itself. The default number is a real-world New York City benchmark, so most cities will not need to touch it.

The size of this line on your monthly budget tracks your population almost linearly.

Parameters

Daily waste per citizen kg

2

Amount of solid waste generated by each citizen per day.

Source: NYC Department of Sanitation

Sanitation workers per daily ton

0.66

Sanitation workers required per daily ton of waste collected.

Source: NYC Department of Sanitation Annual Reports & Budget

Waste collection cost ton

$566

RETIRED as a billing rate; kept as the identity anchor for the split that replaced it. The city used to pay one flat $566 a ton to make garbage vanish. That number is now itemized into COLLECTION_COST_TON (436, the trucks and the crews) plus a disposal price that depends on where the ton actually went — starting at EXPORT_TIP_BASE (130) for the Regional Waste Compact. 436 + 130 = 566, which is why a save from before the waste economy loads into an identical first bill. Nothing bills from this constant any more; the pinned rate-identity test does, and so does anything that needs to explain the old number to a player.

Source: NYC Department of Sanitation

Collection cost ton

$436

What it costs to put one ton of garbage on a truck and drive it away: crews, fuel, vehicle wear, transfer handling. Charged on every ton the city actually collects — a ton left on the curb during a strike or a staffing collapse is not billed, because nobody picked it up. Collection is 53-78% of total municipal solid-waste system cost in the US; 436 is 77% of the legacy 566, putting it at the top of that band, which is where a dense city with union crews sits. Sanitation payroll is billed separately through the civic-salary machinery and is NOT part of this figure.

Source: National Academies of Sciences — municipal solid waste system cost structure

Export tip base

$130

Opening price per ton under the Regional Waste Compact — the standing contract that lets the city put its garbage on a truck to San Gigante and stop thinking about it. This is the rate every city starts on, because every city starts by exporting everything. It is also the floor the rate can never drift back below. NYC’s real export rate went from $63.39 a ton in 2007 to $129.81 in 2016 as the region’s landfills closed and the remaining operators discovered they had a captive customer; the Compact’s ratchet models the same arc.

Source: NYC Independent Budget Office — waste export costs

Landfill tip local

$62

Marginal cost of burying one ton in a landfill the city owns: the working face, the compactor, daily cover, leachate handling. Half the Compact’s opening price, which is the whole reason to dig a hole — but it buys airspace that does not come back, and the fixed monthly cost of running the site is billed separately (LANDFILL_FIXED_MONTHLY), so a nearly-empty landfill is far more expensive per ton than this number suggests.

Source: EREF — 2024 US average MSW landfill tipping fee

Landfill density tons m3

0.8

Tons of compacted municipal solid waste per cubic meter of landfill airspace (1,200-1,600 lb/yd3 after a compactor has run over it). Multiplied by a cell’s footprint and its permitted height, this is what turns ‘an 8x8 hole’ into LANDFILL_CAPACITY_TONS — the number the Full-by date counts down.

Source: EPA / industry in-place waste density figures

Sanitation worker monthly

$3,735

The monthly salary paid to each sanitation worker. This amount is deducted from the city’s waste management budget.

Source: NYC DSNY

Workforce coverage multiplier

1.25

Multiplier applied to the headcount-from-tonnage formula to make 7-day coverage explicit: vacation, sick leave, and weekend/holiday rotations.

⚠️ Source pending