Recycling trash cans double before my eyes

I wanted to let you know I just experienced this problem for the first time. I've had phantom prisoners in my city for a long time, but never phantom trash. (I got the phantom prisoners because I closed a police station and demolished it with a bunch of prisoners inside, and the game never deleted them. So it says I have 22 prisoners and something like 45 at large, but the overlay shows 2 in the stations and 1 at large).

Anyway, I didn't find a way to solve the problem, but I did figure out why it happened. I usually demolish and rebuild areas during the (Sim) evening or overnight, but this time I was re-configuring a large area and didn't pay attention to the time of day. In this case, I was demolishing about a third of my city and rebuilding it. I paused the game somewhere near the beginning of the garbage collection cycle and demolished a large chunk of residential. After putting in my new roads and zoning new residential, I let it run and build up. The next day it showed double the amount of trash that I actually had. 

Since I play offline, I always save under a different name before I make a big change, so I was able to try it again. When I waited until all the garbage was picked up and the dump was waiting for the next collection cycle, I was able to demolish the whole area without causing an issue with the trash numbers. I did have the same thing happen when my trash dump closed through a whole cycle due to "not enough workers". So, I doubt that it will ever resolve once it's happened, but you can prevent it from happening in the future by letting the garbage trucks pick up all the trash before making any large changes the city.

The only positive is that other than annoying messages and Sims protesting at city hall, it doesn't affect the gameplay. It definitely affects my ocd tendencies, though. Makes me crazy when the numbers don't match.