At present an aircraft cabin cleaning truck can hold 500 units of waste. The waste depot can hold 2,500 units, while occupying >50x the area of a cabin cleaning truck. A trash hauler can hold 500 units of waste, despite being larger than the cabin cleaning truck, and not requiring the internal mechanisms for raising and removing trash from aircraft.
The capacity of the waste depot should be substantially increased, e.g. 10,000 units (which would match the food capacity of the catering depot). The capacity of the trash hauler should also be increased, e.g. to 2,000 units (similar to the food delivery truck).
Why it should be implemented:
To better balance the relative capacities of these vehicles and buildings. It’s not reasonable for the depot to hold so little waste, nor for the hauler to hold the same amount as the cabin cleaning truck.
In practice, it takes well under 100 medium flights per day to exceed the waste processing rate of a single waste depot, primarily due to the capacity of the waste hauler, and the relatively infrequent pick ups. A waste hauler capacity of 2K units would greatly improve this, and better match the realistic relative capacities of the vehicles.
I agree. But just a note that you can set when the hauler comes to pick up waste–I have mine set to 1500, so it comes relatively frequently and the depot is never too full to hold more waste coming off the cabin cleaning trucks.
What I think needs urgent attention is how the trucks (both cabin cleaning and catering) handle flights and stands. I find that delays are unavoidable unless I build the catering and waste depots really close to the terminal buildings, which is usually not the case in reality. The reason for the delays, I think, are that the catering trucks are only activated once the flight lands and docks. They then have to drive to the catering depot, load up, and drive back to the stand. Whereas I assume in real life, if turnaround is quick, then meals are ready for loading by the time the aircraft is ready for turnaround. Similarly, for waste, the trucks load up trash, then if they’re not full, they don’t empty waste. So they wait around idling, until the next plane comes along, and eventually, become full before they fully unload a plane. Then they drive all the way to the waste depot, take ages (hours) to unload trash, and drive back to finish the job–when other trucks should have taken over the job. In terms of unloading trash, surely most are just tip trucks, where gravity does the bulk of the work?
So my suggestions would be:
for catering trucks: provided you have adequate trucks, they should either begin loading meals before the arrival of the flight, or they should just fully stock up when they visit the depots–and then service more than one flight–to avoid unnecessary drives around the airport;
for cleaning trucks: again, if adequate trucks are available, then if they have time to idle, they should empty out trash instead; or they should arrange multiple trucks to do the job if one truck can’t handle all the trash; and they should make emptying out trash into the depot a lot faster.