This might be a bit late, to respond to this post, but here goes.
To get your garbage / recycling working correctly do the following:
1. Make sure your public transport works well, to ease the traffic flow.
2. Make sure to educate your sims to have them recycle more than they trash.
3. Make sure not to send your trucks to neighboring cities or to have your garbage / recycling collected by neighboring cities.
4. Make sure you have enough garbage / recycling trucks and make sure you don't run out of space, if you run out of space, it might be time to upgrade your recycling / garbage centers.
5. Make sure to have a trade center and to have enough trucks to go to the trade center, from your recycling center.
6. Make sure to have storage holds for the type of materials you recycle, at both the recycling center and trade center, ie: alloy, plastic & metal.
7. Make sure you have enough trucks at the trade center to get rid of materials.
8. Easiest way to get rid of materials is to have it sold to the market.
If you were to follow these steps, you are ensured to have a well functioning garbage system.
9. Make sure to start educating your sims early and to start both recycling & garbage collections early to ensure you don't run into trouble.
I hope this helps other people that might be struggling with this issue.
I hope this user is still around and can reply, because I like the rationality of this reply. I have encountered a similar problem which I believe is a genuine glitch.
I had (past tense) a garbage and recyclable collection problem. I have encountered it several times but haven't had an opportunity to really work on it (high school teacher). There are 120k residents in this city.
Initially the problem was a genuine resource allocation problem. I did not have enough dumps and recycling centers to pick everything up. After creating two dumps and two recycling centers there are sufficient trucks to pick everything up.
Then I discovered the flaw in my road system. I had already set up a processors factory and a TV/computer factory (importing raw commodities). Also have trade depots set up (landlocked so no port). I had an intersection right at the access point from the highway (grrrr) that was blocking traffic entering the city. Once I cleared that up trucks are able to get in to pick up TVs and computers for the global market. After that bottleneck cleared the supply chain opened up. Computers and TVs are selling like gangbusters, there are no clogged storage facilities in my trade depots, and recycling/trash pickup is finishing daily by noon-2pm in the game cycle.
So here is what I believe is a glitch. The game tells me there are 179k bins of recycling to be picked up in a city of 120k. I watched the waste disposal map for several 24-hour cycles in the game and the recycling trucks/centers are picking up and processing around 12k daily (about 8-10k garbage being collected as well). They finish by around noon in the game, the trucks park in their garages, and the centers shut down actually until the next 24 cycle begins.
The game still shows approximately 179k bins to be collected... BUT there hasn't been a protest in over a month (at least) in the game time, the happiness map shows everyone copacetic, and I also haven't had any buildings abandoned for garbage or germs in a month (game time) at least.
This doesn't seem to be affecting game play, but it's the kind of thing that drives a perfectionist like me nuts. The game still shows 179k bins to be collected every day. Hmm...
