How To Use the Incineration Plant in Cities: Skylines

An incineration plant with some garbage trucks driving past (Cities: Skylines)

The incineration plant is a garbage disposal building that burns trash, and produces a small amount of electricity.

Once built and operational, your incineration plant will send out a fleet of up to 27 garbage trucks to collect trash from your different buildings, and bring it back to the plant for processing.

Unlocking & Building

The Incineration Plant is unlocked at the Big Town milestone. Depending on the map, this can be anywhere from 1,800 to 7,500 in population.

Once you unlock it, you’ll find it in the Garbage and Industry build menu. It costs ₡30,000 to build.

The incineration plant in the Garbage and Industry build menu. / Cities: Skylines
The incineration plant in the Garbage and Industry build menu.

As the incinerator produces power from the trash it burns (up to 12MW), you don’t need to provide it with electricity from your power plants. However, it’s often useful to hook it up to your power grid anyway, so other buildings can benefit from its power output.

Without power lines, the incinerator can provide power to the buildings adjacent to it.

The incineration plant produces as much ground pollution as a landfill (100), as well as 50 noise. So keep it well away from your residential areas, as it will significantly lower the land value and may even make your citizens sick.

Phasing Out Landfills With Incinerators

The biggest advantage of incineration plants over landfills is that they process the garbage instead of just storing it. This means you won’t have to worry about them being full and needing to be emptied.

A garbage truck bringing trash from a landfill site to an incineration plant for processing. / Cities: Skylines
A garbage truck bringing trash from a landfill site to an incineration plant for processing.

In fact, a great use of incinerators is to process the garbage from your filled-up landfill sites. When you empty a landfill site, and you have an incinerator in your city, the garbage trucks can bring the trash to the latter for processing.

This means once you have incinerators, you can eventually phase out the use of landfills completely.

Just empty out any landfill sites then bulldoze them afterwards.

Garbage Processing Capacity

Bear in mind that while incinerators don’t get filled up, there is a limit to how much garbage each one can process in a week.

You can check your city’s garbage processing capacity, versus its garbage production, by clicking on the trash can icon in the info views panel. / Cities: Skylines
You can check your city’s garbage processing capacity, versus its garbage production, by clicking on the trash can icon in the info views panel.

Also, as your city grows, there might be too much trash for your incinerator’s 27 trucks to collect.

Keep an eye out for buildings—especially those farther away from your incinerator plant—that complain about garbage piling up. In this case, it might be time to build an additional one.

Liz Villegas

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Liz is a writer and photographer with a love for building and strategy games. Her spare time is often split between lifting, reading, drawing, annoying her dog Mr. Porky Butt, and squinting at stat tables on the wiki pages of whatever game she's currently playing.

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