32 replies to this topic

[Grendil]

As has been repeatedly noted in other posts, Recycling Centers can stop working, and once they do, they never start processing incoming materials again, and the collection trucks stop running.  The anecdotal solution is to demolish them and rebuild.  If you have multiple centers, they will all stop at once, and you only need to demolish and rebuild one center to get them all working again.   This works, but as some folks have noted, this can sometimes only work for a period of time before they stop functioning again.  It also costs a fortune.  I think I've found a better way:

 

After a bit of messing around, I think the issue is that once all your recycling centers max out on recyclable materials, a bug in the game makes them stop processing any of it.  So they stay locked in that state, and the trucks don't run because they'd have nowhere to put any more collected materials.  But if you build another center (you don't need to demolish an existing one unless you need the space), they'll start working again.  BUT, if your city, like mine, has mile high piles of recyclables everywhere, and each truck collects 3 tons per outing, it might not take long to fill up the new center's 20 ton storage capacity.  If you introduce recycling to a city with around 200 K population (perhaps especially if the garbage was already piling up there) they will create massive amounts of recycling materials very quickly.  The crux of the problem is that the inflow of new materials is greater than the processing capacity of the center to convert it to output goods like plastic.  

 

Knowing all this, you can manage the situation and avoid the bug in the first place.  Resist the urge to start a massive collection effort in your city.  Have 3 or 4 reclamation lines in your recycling center, but only 1-3 collection trucks.  Most importantly keep an eye on your materials storage and when it gets in the orange zone, just stop collecting (turn the truck modules off individually).  If you need to handle your city's build up quicker, build a second center right off the bat, and do the same thing there.  Just be aware that trucks aren't partial to which center they drop off at, so all your trucks might end up filling up one center's material storage and not spread the load evenly.  That's probably ok, but keep your eye on each center individually to avoid a sudden rush on your last remaining center.  Best to build the centers in opposite ends of the city, and best to start recycling early in your city's life, so they can keep up with the growing amounts of recycling materials generated.

 

Yeah the bug stinks, and hopefully it gets patched.  Broken Recycling Centers can completely devastate a mature city, as recycling piles up, ground everywhere gets polluted, everybody gets sick, and death runs rampant. Building new centers repeatedly (especially if you demolish the old one) can bankrupt a city. Hopefully this workaround helps.

[Dirktator]

Thanks for this!

This is a travesty. Good grief, Maxis, what are you doing to us...

[McFluffy]

Thanks, lost a city to that bug. Another thing I have seen on the simcity answer site is that if you have trucks sent to another city call them home. Apparently that works for some.

[lars_city]

From what I tested myself, it is when you send recycling trucks to foreign cities to help them that this $%&^! occurs, you cannot process the other guy's garbage for some weird reason this is what fills your storage up... go ahead and try, I been running without any issues since I stopped collecting garbage from other cities than my own.

[sasukejo]

guys, think i m not understand the problem , i no have problems with center of recycle . when it is full,  the truck recycled transporting the material to warehouse of storage, that make with warehouse be full , so you make the choice

 

Which destination you should give the material (recycled) you can use locally (Causes them to be exploited by local industry or you can export them (earning extra money from the sale).
In my town have all trucks, garbage collection and transportation of recycled and I have no problems with overcrowding the recycling center using this estratregia the secret warehouses in this exchange

[Gavron]

Same problem here, 3 recycling centers stucked that was covering multiple cities... the Warehouse's stucked too

The result is: 600 people "sick" and waiting for updates before restart playing Simcity

[beatle]

I will have to try that workaround of stopping the regional recycling, thanks!  

 

In relation to plastic and alloy, - does anyone have a problem importing Alloy with the trade depots?  It seems to be always empty - I am not sure if its because the processor factories are taking it as fast as it is being imported. I don't want to add another alloy depot for importing or I will go broke from all the imports. Any thoughts or ideas?!

[beatle]

... well I was going to stop the regional recycling but when I entered the game my city of 190k was gone and is currently busy processing   good grief Maxis is right Dirktator! 

[ifurkend]

Actually I have encountered another bug that, after the fulled recycling center bug occurred, I destroyed it and built a new one, no matter how long I wait, no truck is going out to collect any recyclable at all and the red message says "no recyclable out there can be collected. Production line halted". All subsequent recycling centers I built later have the same issue.

 

 Spark_2013-03-16_18-08-39.jpg   123.3KB   28 downloads

[dognose]

Hey there,

 

theres a better work around to keep your centers running, even at max capactiy:

 

1.) Stop sending your trucks to a neighbor city (just to be sure)

2.) Build a new recycling center.

3.) Wait until it starts working, and has a bunch of materials inside (but NOT full)

4.) Cut of the street, and leave it alone

 

EVERY other Center - even if full - will now work correctly. (but remember, they are only working

between 7 am and 6 pm)

 

 

I have workers trapped in there - dunno if it is required.

 

[funkyplasma]

This is not a bug and its working fine

 

if your depots are full of your plasic , alloy , metals, its because you have not created a TRADE DEPOT http://simcity2013wi...iki/Trade_Depot

 

you need to build a Trade Depot and also have the correct storage addons for plastic , alloy and metal if you wish to recycle.

 

The Trade Depot not only allows you to make loads of money and export these materials to other citys BUT.. also it your own distribution network for your own city if you require these types of goods for use in your own city workds for coal, oil , ore etc... as well

[Darmok]

This is not a bug and its working fine

 

if your depots are full of your plasic , alloy , metals, its because you have not created a TRADE DEPOT http://simcity2013wi...iki/Trade_Depot

 

you need to build a Trade Depot and also have the correct storage addons for plastic , alloy and metal if you wish to recycle.

 

The Trade Depot not only allows you to make loads of money and export these materials to other citys BUT.. also it your own distribution network for your own city if you require these types of goods for use in your own city workds for coal, oil , ore etc... as well

 

@funkyplasma

 

While your comment is in part true, it's not relevant.

I have two trade depots, with lots of room for plastics and metal and in fact WAITING for the recycling center to send said plastic and metal, and as the aformentioned recycling center stopped working the trade depots are waiting to receive their materials.

So yes, it does seem like a bug to me too....

I'll try the workaround tonight

[SP4CEY]

This is not a bug and its working fine

 

if your depots are full of your plasic , alloy , metals, its because you have not created a TRADE DEPOT http://simcity2013wi...iki/Trade_Depot

 

you need to build a Trade Depot and also have the correct storage addons for plastic , alloy and metal if you wish to recycle.

 

The Trade Depot not only allows you to make loads of money and export these materials to other citys BUT.. also it your own distribution network for your own city if you require these types of goods for use in your own city workds for coal, oil , ore etc... as well

 

Wrong.

 

I have two empty trade centres with space for plastics, metals and alloys and trucks picking up nothing from the FULL recycling centre.

[gerbles]

So, just trying to figure out if this is a bug or if I'm not doing this right,  but what sort of storage should I have at my trade depot to accept metal deliveries from the recycling center? I have ore and alloy storage. My issue is that my plastics and alloy are making it to the trade depot, but the metal isn't. It just sits in the recycling center. I have like 3 or 4 reclaiment delivery trucks. Any help would be great!

[beatle]

This may sound silly, but I am wondering if the recycling center is filling up on one specific type of recycling material, if you don't have all 3 types of reclamation lines in place to consume it.

 

For example, before I did not have a metals reclamation line tied to the recycling plant, I only cared about alloy and plastic.  So what I did was blow up the old recycling plant, stopped the regional recycling trucks, added an alloy, plastic and metals reclamation lines to it, made sure I was exporting metals in my trade depot while the plastic and alloy was being delivered to the processor factories.  Things seem to be working ok now (so far).

[beatle]

So, just trying to figure out if this is a bug or if I'm not doing this right,  but what sort of storage should I have at my trade depot to accept metal deliveries from the recycling center? I have ore and alloy storage. My issue is that my plastics and alloy are making it to the trade depot, but the metal isn't. It just sits in the recycling center. I have like 3 or 4 reclaiment delivery trucks. Any help would be great!

 

You will need to buy a metals storage at the trade depot gerbles.  Make sure it is set to export in the manage global area..

[Darmok]

One thing I've noticed last night,
instead of placing a new one and trying a workaroud, I decided to turn on the garbage map and watched the recycling collecting trucks do their jobs, and when, finaly, they decided to come back to the recycling center the center started to work again, for a short time, then a few minutes later stopped again, and it begun the same cycle when more trucks came back.... so perhaps the problem lies in the bad traffic bug which slows the recycling truck to much for them to bring back the plastic and metal to the center in a timely manner.

And there lots and lots of recycling material that is not being picked up

I await the traffic patch to verify that assertion.

[Brigidgeran]

My recycling center was fully developed (plastic, metal) and it went full. After reading this thread, I added the trade depot with extra storage for plastic and metal. After a few game days the recycling center started to work again. I selected to export both plastic and metal in the trade depot and this let me collect a lot of simoleons.

[sasukejo]

guys listen to me , i understand your problem, sorry i ' m brazilian so my english is not very good.
after make tests lot of times about this problem , actually i'm searching another thing , i noticed this the problem of garbage happens because o system of collect work in turns. Look the workers in center of recycle they need to rest obvious things . well done,  the thing i'm looking for is about garbage total generated and total garbage collected and about it and I think it has to do with traffic , was looking for this when noticed about  work turns.
 

[altheaphia]

I have spent days on this issue. I discovered the extreme profitability of recycling centers on the day of release (lucky I got to play on release day? /shrug) Although I didn't really write down exactly how much it was, it was something in the order of hitting 1 million simoleans before hitting any significant population. As most people know, the specific play strategy was to build the recycling center, hook-up a trade depot, make sure none of them run out of storage space, and clear/manageable road traffic.

 

One day they changed it (same day they removed cheetah speed). Recycling centers no longer functioned properly. Maybe because they attempted to nerf the abonormal amounts of money you can gain from recycling alone? My notes:

 

• Processing plants no longer process as fast: Currently, 4 collection trucks with clear traffic and plenty to collect can overwhelm a recycling center running 4 processing lines. At first I thought that maybe you needed a specific set of lines (e.g. some 4-combination of plastic, alloy, metal) but that's doesn't seem to matter. So the question is, why even have the ability to send out 16 collection trucks? This feels like they tweaked the processing of recycling materials and slowed it down to stem the tide of simoleans that can be accomplished. Alternative speculation; at release I used nothing but cheetah, so maybe llama speed imposed under cheetah selection is causing the proportions to be all wrong?
• Collection trucks conflict with each other and go all over the place: When you have a lot of collection trucks out there; Sometimes a few of them are all going to the same building, and depending on road layout, they skip around a lot, drive right by the next apparent closest collection and go somewhere else for the next stop. I have seen them all follow each other around and with clear traffic, create a traffic jam among themselves. I did however, at one point, see two trucks leap-frogging collection points down the street... it was at least amusing to watch. It's SimCity's nature to not have any collection of sims to have a collective plan and because of this, it cripples systems like recycling once a city's population becomes large.
• "Waiting for collection shift to start": First it should be noted that at no time a shift was imposed early on, at a low enough population but high enough to have plenty of bins out there, I had 2 trucks in constant, around-the-clock collection... but that changes when the city gets big. I could see that the collection shift is defined by some variables, but I couldn't determine all of them. The collection shift always started at around 5AM. I was able to have one or more of my 4 recycling stores open with at least 0.3 tons of space which kept the processing going on all centers and collection trucks out as long as possible... but at some point they stop collecting and return to a garage at end of the collection shift. On my particular test city I had 4 centers. With 6 trucks they ended their shift at about 2AM but left a lot more to be collected the next day. With 16 the shift ended at around 5PM but didn't really keep up with the daily new bins. With 58 (fifty-eight) the shift ended at around 8-10AM... so more trucks just ended the shift earlier and had a minimal effect of how complete your collection was. Once a collection shift is imposed, a large enough city will almost always put out more bins than your shift can collect. While I was able to get a beat on this and slowly reduce my overage, it was micro-management to the max... which brings me to my next observation...
• Paying for time not working! Once the collection shift is over the production lines work for a little longer... about the same time they take to spool up. So If my collection shift was over by noon, I was still paying hourly expenses for centers, their collection trucks and delivery trucks for the next ~15 hours with them doing nothing! So of course I turned them off, which saves me ~10,000 simoleans an hour for 4 centers... but I gotta say... doing that every day is more annoying than entertaining. FYI if you turn off your recycling centers to save simoleans, you must turn them back on way before 5AM to allow them to, "hire workers" again... in my city this took about 1.5 hours... I was turning them back on at 3AM.
• "Producing Plastic, Alloy, and Metal" but no processing is actually occurring: Yes I have run across this... while bulldozing the entire center may work, I was able to get it working again by placing a 2nd one. There may be other things you could try, such as bulldozing 1 delivery truck (while editing the center) and replacing it.

 

Since a large accumulation of recycling bins makes places germy, recycling can't just be ignored/not implemented. At the current game's code version recycling is quickly becoming a very not fun and rather annoying part of the game.

[cHiCiTycLuE]

I know this will not help those of you with well developed cities with recycling plants... but those ones thats underdeveloped, if your city lacks in schools then there will be no recycling... only educated sims recycle

[ds5384]

I

10

I have 4 cities in the same region with roughly the same layout 90% residential and 10% other. 3-4 recycling plants each. City A will run trucks till 4 and process till 6PM. Cities B and C will run trucks till 11AM and process till empty which usually happens around 3. City D will pick up 2/3 of all the recycling in the city with only 6 trucks staffed, 16k recycle bins approximately. They all process and pickup at various rates and regardless of traffic conditions and education levels (which are the same). The rate of delivery is different for each city and plant -eg 4800 crates of plastic per hour, or 2400.

 

I cannot figure out why anything happens like it does, only that if you don't have functioning recycle centers your city will go bankrupt due to the crippled profitabilty of the tourist attractions and the miserable traffic situation AND the extortionate cost of providing ineffective public services like fire police and health. The only thing that works is the street cars and i think thats because they cant make their own decisions about where to drive. 

 

I hate this game yet I subject myself to the misery of playing it nightly. Dumb.

 

10

 

10

[superfurry316]

This just started to happen to me, thanks to googling "simcity recycling centre bug" I came across this topic quickly. Will try building a 2nd (and possibly a 3rd) recycling centre with maxed out add-ons to see what happens. Not ideal, but I am relying on imported recycling trucks in one city, really don't want to have to build one in there itself. In the city exporting the trucks the centre just refuses to work. And in the 2nd city the trucks just don't turn up. 

[H-D]

Same problem.  Trinity Point is my city.  I have two recycling plants.  Both have maxed out reclamation trucks but default number of recycling collection trucks.BUT....This is not reflected on the popup window when you click on the recycling plant.  Instead that window says I have 20 collection trucks and 4 delivery trucks.  Here's how the numbers break down:

 

173,159 residents

Taxed at 10%, 10%, 9%

Businesses:

10%, 11%, 9%

 

Outgoing - $43,120/hr

Incoming - 36,373/hr

Monthly transactions:

+$100,000 bond - May

-$52,984 bond - May

-$4,423 coal - April

-$4,500 oil - April

+$100,000 bond - April

+$50,000 bond - April

4x -$4,423 coal - April

+12,003 plastic - April

 

Trading depots say I make $29,593 on metal and $48,375 on alloy

 

Recycling Center 1

$2700/hr

Window says I have:

20 collection trucks

4 deliver trucks

312 tons/day - plastic

consumed recyclables - 3.1 tons/day

alloy - 0

storage 19.9/20 tons

plastic storage - 110.4/2,000 crates

alloy - 4.4/10 tons

delivered 500 crates of plastic

 

2 plastic processing plants

1 alloy processing plant

 

Visible garages:

4 delivery and 1 collection

I deleted one delivery garage and re-added it.  No it seems I can create an unlimited number of garages - both kinds

 

3,261 of 4,706 garbage cans collected

8 of 9,422 recycle bins collected

 

Recycling Center 2

$1800/hr

plastic produced 156 crates/day

consumed 1.6 tons/day

metal - 0

alloy - 0

storage 20/20 tons

plastic storage - 17.1/1000 crates

metal storage - 0.3/10 tons of metal

alloy storage - 2.1/10 tons

Delivered 500 crates of plastic today

Window says 2 collection trucks and 4 delivery trucks

Visible garages - 4 delivery and 1 collection

 

1 plastic processing plant

1 alloy processing plant

1 metal processing plant

 

Trade Depot 1

$270/hr

,500/2,000 barrels of oil

500/4,000 crates of plastic

0/16.2 crates of freight

deliver trucks - 2

1 oil lot

2 plastic lots

 

Trade Depot 2

$270/hr

0/20 tons of alloy

15/20 tons of coal

0/20 tons of metal

0/16.2 crates of freight

Delivered 100 tons of coal today

 

Game crashed while typing this.  Time was rolled back.  I can no longer create unlimited garages for the recycling centers.  New/old garbage pick-up numbers:

 

3,261/4,706 of garbage

4,106/13,562 of recycling

 

I noticed after I put in recycling centers and depots I would randomly have quite a bit of cash and soon realized this was from the depots.  Up to that point I was making about $4k a month.  Then all of a sudden I went way in the red with virtually no changes in anything.  I started losing $4k-$7k.  Every now and then I would get huge profits from the trading that would offset these red numbers.  I continued trying to figure out why I was so far in the red.  None of the maps showed any real problems nor a reason why I suddenly started losing money.  The money from the depots seemed kind of hit or miss on the timing.  One minute I would gain like $50k.  Then I would gradually start losing it.  Then all of a sudden I would get like $120k.  This was all happening at cheetah speed.  A resident building would say where is the shopping while I business next to it would say no customers and the business next to that one would say big profits from customers and a nearby resident would say they love the shopping.  The trade depot is right next to the recycling centers on low traffic roads.  I do not show any real traffic problems.  Bus terminal waits are 30 minutes.  I spiked the taxes and took out loans to stay up while I tried to figure out what was going wrong.  Since I can no longer take out loans to stay afloat and I don't have enough to try the destroy/rebuild thing I guess I will just stay out of this city until they get it fixed.

[ipggi]

I hate this bug .. it's crippled this and other mature cities of mine.

 

[poisenloaf]

I think I may have figured out a workaround.. next time your recycling plant stops creating plastics/alloys/etc do this:

 

1. Power off one of your recycling plants..wait a few seconds.

2. edit the plant and power on all the individual lines..waiting a few seconds.

3. power on the plant..wait a few seconds.

4. wait 1 hour for plant to hire workers.. All plants should start processing ore again until bug is triggered again.

 

I also have better luck if I wait until after 5am game time to do this.

[Hortnon]

I did everything in this thread and couldn't resolve the issue. Powering recycling off for several days, powering off individual lines, destroying and rebuilding, destroying and rebuilding somewhere else and nothing worked. Magically, adding a second recycling plant cleared it up for both plants the instant it opened. The problem now is there was such a backlog that the trucks can't pick anything up for 2 or 3 days at a time as the plants process what has been picked up.

[Eddis23]

Been struggling with recycling issues in my education town. 24k recyclables but only 12k are being collected.

 

My solution? Add 3 more recycling centers (maxxed out and balanced for chip production with metal exports, and full truck complement).

 

What actually happened? My collection remained the same! heh...

 

I read the OP here, and thought it was worth a try. I deleted 4 of 8 trucks for each of the recycling centers and waited over 2 days, just watching the centers - paying particular notice at 5 am (when recycling starts).

 

I noticed 2 bugs (surprise!):

 

1. Even after deleting 4 trucks, the mouse click display of the centers shows 8 of 8 still.

 

2. The game deploys 8 trucks depite me having deleted them.

 

I noticed 1 Working-As-Intended however:

 

The delivery trucks (max 4) are correctly removed from the mouse click window.

 

So the solution in this case I am guessing will be do demo all your centers, place new ones and work from 2 trucks up until you reach a point where you are satisfied with the preformance.

 

A bit more backstory, all 4 of my centers are located in a balanced location within 4 quadrants of a generally gridlike city, however i have witnessed on several occasions what seems to be recycling trucks from OTHER centers delivering more to 1 center in particular, rather than strictly deliver to their home center. Fail.

 

Another fail, centers will stop working at 3 PM, leaving unprocessed materials. In many cases they stop working at 18+ of 20 capacity, thus preventing the center from being empty and ready to take on a full load again the next day at 7-9 am (when the next days collection starts to dump off their treasure).

 

A plop to add storage to the center for unprocessed recyclables, as well as having the center operate after 3 pm until the center is empty of unprocessed materials would be nice.

[CreeperMoon2]

So basically My TVs Processors and trade depot wont revive any metal alloy or plastic from the recycling center well that screws my archaeology great work plan...

[fpdlskf]

I just gave up and stopped recycling.