If all you want is how much and what kind of waste each factory produces, there is no shame in it. Using the spreadsheet linked below, find the building you are interested in and look at the last two columns for the amount of trash produced per 100t of output (or 100,000 workdays for vehicle production lines), with further breakdowns in columns S-AF. Simply multiply it by the daily output (ie. 21t x 6/100 = 1.26t for distillery) and you will know how much trash it produces each day assuming 100% productivity and full staffing.

NOTE: For ease of testing, I had all difficulty options disabled except waste. Water and electricity seem to increase production waste (ie. ‘max daily garbage production’) in buildings that have them as explicit inputs. From my limited testing they do not change the ratios, so if you are playing with these options enabled make a copy of the sheet and change column F to what is shown in your game.

Link: Google Sheets - Industrial Waste Spreadsheet[docs.google.com]

But if you want to learn more about the inner workings of Workers & Resources’ waste system (albeit only for production buildings) then stick around and maybe you can help answer some questions.

If you look at most industrial buildings, you will see that they have a big garbage container for ‘mixed waste’. But when you look at the price list, there is no ‘mixed waste’ listed in the price tab. And why do some buildings have separate bins for hazardous waste?


As the name implies, mixed waste is a mix of different types of waste. There are ten categories in game:
construction, metal, aluminum, plastic, biological, fertilizer, burnable, hazardous, other, ash

Most of the trash you encounter will be a mixture. You can use stands and transfer stations to put different kinds in separate bins (using the +/- buttons or left-clicking on the container icons), but you cannot use it to separate burnables from other waste or ash. As long as there is no hazardous waste in the mix, all of it gets lumped as ‘mixed waste’ but the game will keep track of exact mix - if you mix 10t of bio waste worth ₽10 and 10t of fertilizer worth ₽20, then it will be 20t of mixed waste worth ₽30. This is also important when you burn the waste as different kinds will leave different amounts of ash behind.

However, as soon as there is any hazardous waste in the mix, the entire batch gets put in the hazard bin. If you took 9t of other waste and added 1t of hazardous waste, then the entire 10t would be ‘contaminated’ but it does not mean that you would now have 10t of hazardous waste. It can be a bit confusing at first - if you ever wondered why your hazard waste import wasn’t making as much money as you thought it would - but it is an important concept to grasp.

With that in mind, how does waste get produced?

The most straightforward way of making waste is by producing or extracting resources. If you look at the info card in the build menu, most industrial buildings will have a line that says ‘Max daily garbage production’. A vanilla iron processing plant lists 6.00t which means that for every 105t of iron it will produce 6t of waste. It scales directly with production - if your plant only produces 21t of iron in a day, then it generates 1.2t of waste. If production stops, then no waste is produced.

If there is no ‘max daily garbage production’ stat (such as an asphalt plant) then it does not generate any waste from production. It is disabled by including $WASTE_PRODUCTION_DISABLE in the building’s ini file.

The second, though often insignificant, way that waste is produced is by workers. Every building that employs workers will have a ‘garbage production per worker’ stat - note that it is listed in kilograms and not tons. For industrial buildings you will mostly see 0.60kg with a few 0.43kgs, but civilian buildings can have other values as well. Note that workers' garbage is not included in the max daily production stat.

It does not scale with production or productivity, rather every worker generates a set amount when they finish their shift. If your steel mill is out of resources and 500 workers sit around doing nothing, then when they clock out they will leave 0.3t of waste behind. For normal gameplay this can be treated like a rounding error, since a fully productive steel mill will create just shy of 11t of waste.

There are a few special cases where waste gets created or destroyed.

• Overflowing bins: any garbage bin (either built-in or separate) can hold 200% of its listed capacity ie. a 6.5t container can hold up to 13t of waste. Any garbage beyond it will be dumped outside and converted into pollution. If you are struggling with unexplained pollution in your residential area, check that all of the buildings are connected to garbage stands as built-in bins can only hold 0.12t and will quickly overflow.
  
• Incinerators: a lot of waste can be burned in an incinerator to turn it into ash, which takes up less space and can be scattered in a dump. The processing efficiency notes how much of the waste is burned, with the rest being left as ash. 80% efficiency on other waste means that it is 5x more efficient to transport ash than raw waste. Note that not listed will be passed through and not turned into ash.
  
• Ash: when placed in a dump, ash will blow away over time. I have not been able to figure out the exact formula (see later sections for discussion) but it is affected by wind speed and gets diminishing returns from dump size i.e. one large dump is better than one small dump, but you are better off spreading it across multiple small ones instead.
  
• Hazard waste treatment: you can use chemicals to treat hazardous waste to make it less polluting. Note that stats shown on the waste treatment plant are assuming pure hazardous waste i.e. if you have a container with 9t of other and 1t of hazard, it will only use up 0.148t of chemicals. Hazard waste gets directly processed into other waste, regardless of what is included in the mix. Everything else gets placed in the ‘mixed waste’ without any changes.
  
• Livestock: cattle produce bio waste and fertilizer purely by existing. See later section for breakdown, but every 100t of cattle will generate 0.3t of bio waste and 1.5t of fertilizer per day. Unless you want to farm them for this waste, it is best to process it into meat as quickly as possible.
  
• Bio into fertilizer: similar to how ash gets blown from the dumps, any bio waste left in a dump will slowly compost into fertilizer. See later section for exact numbers, but you can expect around 0.05-0.07t of fertilizer per dump each day.

The UI is very vague about the exact composition of the mixed waste. If you hover over the container, you will get a list of all the components. However the percentages are very broad and do not add up to 100%, so we can’t use them to figure out the exact ratios.


To get more precise numbers in the game, turn on cheat mode (press C+H+E), hover over the container, and hold ‘Q’. This will show the weight of each component rounded to two decimal places.


This is more than enough accuracy for general gameplay, however it is difficult to figure out exact ratios from it. The three numbers don’t add up to 0.07t and we can’t be certain of the ratios as they could be nearly identical (0.0149 / 0.0151) or vastly different (0.0051 / 0.0244). You could run the game longer, but then you run into issues of separating worker waste from production waste. To get absolute accuracy, we will need to read the values straight from memory using software like CheatEngine.

I won’t bore you with details on how to find individual values, but some tips if you try it yourself:

• The exact regions of memory will be different each time you boot up the game
  
• Many of the game variables seem to be stored as floats (hence name of the guide)
  
• Mixed waste and hazardous waste containers are separate chunks of memory
  
• Within each chunk, individual components are always listed in the same order, 10 apart (see screenshot below)

The amount and kind of waste produced by the worker is independent of the building - every workplace with 0.60kg will produce the exact same garbage. From limited testing foreign workers generate 90% of the trash, in the same ratios, but this might require further testing. For industries there are two categories of workers:

• 0.60kg – 0.10kg bio, 0.20kg burn, 0.30kg other
  
• 0.43kg – 0.10kg bio, 0.12kg burn, 0.10kg other, 0.11kg const

It would take 1 billion (10^9) shifts for the floating-point differences to add up to 0.01t so they can be ignored.

The general logic and prevailing folk wisdom is that the waste produced by a factory would follow a formula based on the resources being used and/or produced. And in broad strokes it does line up with the data we see on the spreadsheet. Crop processing (food/alcohol/etc) produces bio waste, iron and steel processing produces metal scraps.

However, we get an aluminum spanner thrown in the works. None of the aluminum chain buildings produce any aluminum scrap. The only vanilla industry that uses aluminum is the airplane production line, but this has waste production disabled. Even after turning it back on, it does not produce any aluminum scrap. The only vanilla way of obtaining it is by scrapping planes and helicopters or importing it from the border (either pure or as mixed waste).

In my limited testing with modded buildings, I have been able to produce aluminum scrap by using Wild Bunny’s electronics factory (from the “Light Industry Collection”) that uses aluminum. To the best of my knowledge there are no settings in mods’ ini files about waste production (other than disabling it entirely) - but I would appreciate input from any experienced mod makers who can shine some light on this. I would assume that there is some script baked into the game's code that automatically calculates waste output.

If I was to attempt reverse engineering this formula, I would need some simple cases for testing. Food factories, distilleries, and livestock farms all have a single input (crops), identical waste ratios, and produce no hazardous waste, making them ideal for testing.

My first thought was that perhaps it takes a fixed percentage of input materials and converts them into waste? Dividing waste by inputs was giving me round numbers but they were different for each building (food 2.6%, distillery 4.0%, livestock 2.5%). This seems unlikely, as all of them are defined simply as $TYPE_FACTORY. Furthermore, while Robs074’s food factories (that use vanilla input/output ratios) matched the 2.6% figure, Wild Bunny’s pasta factory (which produces 50% more food from the same inputs) was producing only 1.4% of waste.

It is clear that both inputs and outputs have some impact on the amount (and type?) of waste being produced. Sure enough, for most factories production waste is equal to (input - output) x 5%. However, it does not hold true for all factories (highlighted in yellow on the spreadsheet). I will need to do some further testing and number crunching to figure out what makes these different from the other factories, so if anyone has any suggestions (or has done the research) I would greatly appreciate it. At a glance it seems to be most common in factories where inputs and outputs are from different categories, such as steel mills (aggregate, open)?


Extraction buildings (0.43kg/worker) such as iron, coal, bauxite, and uranium mines generate waste equal to 1.75% of their output.

So why does the vanilla airplane production line not output any aluminum scrap? Car, train, and ship production lines all output the same ratio of waste, suggesting that maybe it is somehow tied to the building type? But plane production has different ratios than the other three. Most likely the devs disabled waste production for rail and plane production as they were not satisfied with it.

If you are playing with vanilla electrical components and electronic factories, you will notice that they are less effective over time. As explained in Community Update #68, with each year each factory will require more materials while producing fewer products until capping out at 170% (components) / 200% (electronics) inputs and 30% (both) outputs. Formulas for the production/material multipliers based on the ini files:

Electrical components:
Production = 1 - (Year - 1960) / 120 ; min 30% [2044]
Materials = 1 + (Year - 1960) / 85 ; max 170% [2020]

Electronics:
Production = 1 - (Year - 1960) / 110 ; min 30% [2037]
Materials = 1 + (Year - 1960) / 100 ; max 200% [2060]

The way these figures compound makes the price of electronics skyrocket and can even make it difficult to fulfill electronics demand with local production. Assuming that we were fabricating our own electrical and mechanical components, producing 1t of electronics would require:

• 1960: 0.633t plastics, 0.633t steel, 0.107t chemicals
  
• 2060: 8.370t plastics, 8.370t steel, 4.030t chemicals

Which is 13.2x more plastics & steel and 37.8x more chemicals per ton of electronics.

However, waste production “per day” remains the same, making the two factories unique in their behavior. A 1960 electronics assembly hall would produce 4.50t of electronics and 0.66t of waste (14.58t of waste per 100t), while 2060 electronics assembly hall would produce 1.35t of electronics and 0.66t of waste (48.59t of waste per 100t). For simplicity, the linked spreadsheet uses 1960 figures.

I decided to bundle these three mechanics together as they all operate on a 6 ticks per day cycle. There also isn’t enough information to justify separate subheadings for them:

Livestock waste
Each tick, the game takes the amount of livestock stored in a building and generates 0.05% bio waste and 0.25% fertilizer. As such, 100t of cattle will generate 0.3t of bio waste and 1.5t of fertilizer.

Bio waste composting
Any bio waste left in a dump (not transfer station) will slowly decay into an identical amount of fertilizer. After testing out different sized dumps, the formula for the amount of bio waste turned into fertilizer each tick is: y = 0.0802x + 0.0492 (R2 = 1.000), where x is the capacity / 1,000t. It does not matter how full the dump is, only the total capacity. If you are using dumps to generate fertilizer, then it is better to spread it between multiple dumps, even if they are smaller. One railway dump (450t) will convert 0.51t/day, while five small dumps (80t each) will convert 1.67t/day.

Ash decay
Likely the most anticipated one, so if you were looking for precise numbers I am afraid the best I have is decent approximations. The biggest challenge with collecting data is that the ash blown away is dependent on wind speed (stored in memory as double, not float) and is updated multiple times a second. For the test I have used the small dump (80t), medium dump (270t), and the railway dump (450t) all filled to their capacity with 100% ash. Each time the amount of ash decreased, I noted the wind speed and how much was blown away. Using this method I arrived at an approximate formula for each dump, where x is the wind speed in m/s

• 80t: y = -0.0045x + 0.0121 (R2 = 0.996)
  
• 270t: y = -0.0073x + 0.0212 (R2 = 0.997)
  
• 450t: y = -0.0157x + 0.0472 (R2 = 0.999)

To better visualize the difference, assuming constant 10m/s wind, each dump will disperse around 0.197t, 0.311t, and 0.659t per day respectively. While I have not been able to figure out the exact correlation between dump size and dispersion, it is clear that it plays a much more significant role than with bio waste. A single 450t railway dump will compost around 53% more bio waste than a single 80t dump, but it will disperse 235% more ash.

If you are playing vanilla, use multiple railway dumps (as recommended by bballjo) in parallel, but if you are okay with using mods I would recommend checking out Robs074 big garbage dump mods, with the largest one holding up to 16,000t.

At first the amount of mixed vs hazardous waste produced by a factory can seem arbitrary, but there is a simple process to how the game determines it. For this example we will use the uranium processing plant which has maximum daily garbage production of 1.7145t (80% other, 20% hazard) and employs 75 workers @ 0.60kg each.

• Worker garbage (0.0450t) all gets placed in the mixed container using the ratios described above
  
• 20% hazardous waste (0.3429t) all gets placed in the hazard container
  
• For all non-hazard production waste 70% (0.9601t) gets placed in the mixed container and 30% (0.4115t) gets placed in the hazard container

The only exception I could find is the gas power plant, which does not have separate hazard containers, so all of it gets mixed together.

Unless you are doing it for roleplay or trying to keep your pollution down to a minimum, no. Waste treatment uses chemicals to turn hazardous waste into other waste. There is no reduction in volume and you still need to sell or burn the resulting other waste.

While other waste (80%) is more efficient to burn than hazardous waste (50%), meaning it will leave less ash behind, the difference is not worth it. It would take 0.49t of chemicals to reduce the ash output by 1 ton.

Processing hazardous waste would let you separate and recycle any scraps from the hazardous bin, but there is only one case where it makes any difference - plastic waste from the electrical components factory. Even then it is a highly inefficient process as it will require 1.83t of chemicals to treat enough hazardous waste for 1 ton of plastic. For comparison, producing fresh plastic takes 0.45t of chemicals and 4.09t of oil per 1 ton of plastic.

Construction, metal, and aluminum scraps are not burnable, so you can simply incinerate the trash and pull it out of the ashes.

If you have made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read through all of this. If you have any experiences that support or contradict anything in this guide, please leave them in the comments. I would also greatly appreciate anyone that wants to recreate or expand any of my tests to verify my numbers.

For simplicity, here is a short list of topics that I want to dive deeper into and could use help with:

• What is happening with the factories that do not follow the 5% waste rule? Do they have something in common, does the game treat 1t of aggregate differently from 1t of liquid, or is the rule wrong?
  
• How exactly does the game derive generated waste? Is it from materials? Why does water and power increase waste production but not change the ratios? Why do neither aluminum plants nor airplane production lines generate aluminum scrap?
  
• What is the correlation between dump size and ash dispersion? Can we derive a single formula like with bio waste?

If you are a content creator, you are welcome to turn part or all of this guide into a wiki, video, infographic, or whatever other format would be more approachable to others. I would appreciate it if you credited and linked to this guide, as it will help to centralize any feedback and corrections to the figures within.

In Community Update #97, the devs are asking which system people want explained in more detail. If we get any new information on the waste system in the future, I will update this guide if necessary.