This is the fix I was most looking forward to. Until now the bin lorries in Voxel City drove round your town and really did empty the bins. Then they went back to the depot and the rubbish just disappeared. A landfill was a tile that made the neighbours unhappy and never filled.
Now every load has to end up somewhere.
Landfills fill up
A bin lorry's loads belong to the depot it came from, and that depot has to put them somewhere. A landfill holds a fixed amount, more for each level you give it. As it fills, the mound on the plot grows in four steps, a quarter at a time, until it's a proper stepped hill with the lorries crawling up it.
When it's full, its lorries carry on to the nearest depot that still has room. If there's nowhere at all, they stay at home, and a card says plainly that there's nowhere for the rubbish to go. The landfill's own window shows how full it is, roughly when it'll be full, and where its lorries are tipping instead.
Then it becomes a hill
A full landfill can be capped. That takes a plan, Capped Landfills, then some money and six months while the clay and soil go on. What's left is a hill park, grassed and terraced with a path zig-zagging up to a viewpoint on top and a few old gas wellheads poking out of the grass.
The neighbours don't love it straight away. It starts out worth a little less to the street than plain grass, and over eight years it climbs to well above it, which is about how it goes with real ones. Later on, the Zero Waste plan lets you dig a hill park back up for a year and get stone and copper out of it.
Recycling pays now
In yesterday's post about what's next, I owned up that the recycling centre's description claimed it earned you money, when it never had. It does now. It sorts three loads in every four, and what it sorts becomes stone and copper in your stores. When the store is full, the spare is sold at twice the plain rate, and that's real income. Compost still takes food waste, and none of that ever reaches the landfill.
Five new depots
For a bigger town there are five new places for rubbish to go.
The transfer station lets small lorries tip close to town while a big one takes it all out to the landfill, so the tip can sit right at the edge of the map. Energy from waste burns up to 150 loads a month and turns it into 180 kW of power, with a little smoke downwind. The circular yard pulls copper, lithium and glass out of the rubbish every month, and has a café in the corner selling reused furniture.
Rubbish tubes are the odd one. Bins in their reach empty into pipes under the street, so there are no bin lorries on those roads at all. And plasma recovery is the late game answer. It takes up to 400 loads a month, makes 400 kW, and leaves glassy blocks you can build with.
Smart bins come with the Under the Streets plan. The lorries only go out for bins that are properly full and get round more of them in a trip. And if you'd rather not deal with it at all, you can pay to send some of your rubbish away each month. With the Good Neighbours plan it goes by train for half as much.
What a month looks like
On one test run through a month the town collected 65 loads. 33 were recycled, 21 were sent away, 6 were burned and only 5 went into the landfill. The Waste view now lists exactly that, where last month's loads went and how much landfill space is left.
There are a couple of things I drew for this that aren't built yet, like a ring on the map showing how full each landfill is. They're coming. Everything above is in the game today.