Re: Sewage and Garbage

by BlackjackWidow
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Sewage and Garbage

★★★ Newbie
My city has now stable economy, I wanted to upgrade the sewage and garbage system. Just like we can upgrade factories, why can't we upgrade sewage and garbage plants. Even if there is an option of replacing them with efficient and cleaner system. Is this possible?
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Re: Sewage and Garbage

[ Edited ]
Hero (Retired)

If you only have the base game, there's not much to do with the garbage dump itself, other than the incinerators. However, if you add a recycling center, you will greatly reduce the amount of garbage produced and get some income from selling the metal, alloy and plastic. Make sure your Sims are educated, and either use the recycled goods as resources for factories (if you have any that need those resources), or put up a trade depot with warehouses for each of the recyclables, and export to the global market to make cash. Recycling is very dependent on education level and length of time they've been educated; ideally you want your education level to be 100% for a few Sim-months, but they will nominally recycle starting around the 3-book education level. If you have the Cities of Tomorrow expansion, you can research garbage atomizers at the Academy (level 3). Those will process the garbage a little bit faster, with zero pollution.

 

Sewage is kind of the same thing; other than adding more treatment tanks, there's nothing to upgrade. CoT expansion includes an Academy research unlock that lets you place a Sewage Sanitizer that will convert all sewage into potable water. Very space-agey designs for both Academy upgrades. Personally, for sewage, I prefer to do the "unlimited water" trick: build your sewage treatment center right next to your water plant. The sewage plant filters everything and dumps clean water into the ground, and the water plant sucks it up to supply the city. You don't need the more expensive water filtration tanks, just the cheaper pump tanks, and you have unlimited water for your city.

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Re: Sewage and Garbage

★★ Novice

You forgot to mention about game bugs. You cannot get recycling from another city, for example. I have two cities, one with a recycling plant with all trucks, another with population 300k and high education. I cannot get recycling plant working with neighbours.

 

And if you check internet, there's a game bug since launch.

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Re: Sewage and Garbage

Hero (Retired)
It's true, sharing services that use transportation (garbage, recycling, police, fire) can be hit and miss. The biggest risk is that the vehicles get stuck in regional traffic, so they don't arrive in time to start and can "forget" why they're there in the first place. It's unfortunate, but the regional sharing has always been difficult to impossible to balance well because of traffic.

Since the player can't add or enlarge regional highways (without mods), there isn't a lot that one can do other than making sure the city streets are flowing as well as possible. I gave up trying to share services that rely on transportation due to the issues. It's annoying, for sure, but now I just give each city their own garbage, recycling, education, etc. The sewer, power and water shares all work well. I usually create one city in the region that is the "utility" city and its only function is to supply the region with those three things. Frees up some room for the other stuff.
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