There are some good reasons for locating Orange County's planned solid waste transfer station at the site of the current landfill on Eubanks Road.

That site is closer to the population centers that produce most of the trash than the other possible locations that have been mentioned. The landfill site is already used to handle trash, of course, so you wouldn't have to disturb any additional parcels of land. And, best of all, it's the cheapest option on the table.

Reasonable considerations all.

But they're outweighed by the arguments, moral and practical, against putting a waste transfer station on Eubanks Road. If a transfer station is necessary -- and that's a question that needs some better answers -- put it somewhere else.

Back in the early 1970s, the landfill opened on Eubanks Road, where the people living next door were -- here's a shock -- the predominantly low-income, black residents of the Rogers Road area.

Those residents were assured at the time by local leaders that they would have to live with the landfill only for a limited time, and then the county would move its solid waste facilities elsewhere.

That never happened. The landfill was expanded, not closed, and for more than 30 years the people who live along Rogers Road have lived with the noise, smell, traffic, trash, discolored groundwater and other noxious side effects of the landfill.

They've done their time. If somebody has to live next to the new solid-waste facility, let someone else take a turn. And if, as we've been told, a waste-transfer station will produce nowhere near the level of unpleasantness that a landfill does, well, then those new neighbors oughtn't mind much.

But even if the Rogers Road residents weren't an issue, Eubanks Road would be the wrong place for the transfer station.

When the landfill opened, that tract was way out in the sticks. Now the towns have grown out to meet it, and there's a lot more development on the way. Eubanks Road is in what has become known as the "Northwest Quadrant," where a great many residential, public and commercial projects are in various stages of planning and construction.

In addition to the existing UPS facility and a park-and-ride lot, Chapel Hill's big new town operations center is just a few vulture's wing flaps to the east of the landfill.

To the west, an elementary school and a middle school are on the way, along with the public Twin Creeks park and soccer fields. Proposed residential projects dot the map nearby.

So Eubanks Road is looking at an enormous increase in traffic in the coming years: school buses, public works trucks, Chapel Hill Transit buses and UPS vans, not to mention many more passenger cars. The last thing we need there is a flotilla of 18-wheelers rumbling down that road into the transfer station every day, loading up our trash and rolling back out again.

Which brings up the most galling point of all. This is a community that prides itself on its commitment to responsible, sustainable, environmentally sound policies and practices. Yet we're planning to foist our garbage -- an estimated 58,000 tons of it each year -- off on someone else, and to rely on a daily succession of big rigs driving many miles, burning fuel and churning out exhaust and pollutants, to do it.

Something is wrong with that picture.

Garbage is nasty stuff, and there's no pleasant, or cheap, way to deal with it. But our trash is our responsibility.