Orange County officials gathered on the spotless blacktop and filed into a tidy break room without a whiff of the dirty diapers and chicken carcasses falling into long-haul trucks on the other side of a glass window.

Upstairs, on the dumping floor of the City of Greensboro Solid Waste Transfer Station, the faint smell of spoiling fish greeted but did not overwhelm them -- even as front-end loaders pushed piles of garbage into holes in the floor and crane-necked tampers squished them down.

"I thought that it would smell," said county Commissioner Pam Hemminger. "Landfills really reek."

Hemminger joined the board in December and was making her first visit to what Orange County solid waste planner Blair Pollock called the most state-of-the-art transfer station in North Carolina.

The building covers nearly an acre of a 9.4-acre site among fields of petroleum tanks in an industrial area on the edge of Greensboro. Walls of green metal and concrete extend 40 feet into the air.

Orange County is planning its own trash depot while at the same time studying alternatives such as hiring a private collector or investing in a waste-to-energy power plant.

The first-choice site for the depot is on 143 acres north of N.C. 54 and west of Orange Grove Road. County officials are still trying to learn more about the land before negotiating a purchase. The owners have asked for $3 million.

A building as large as Greensboro's would dominate the relatively undeveloped landscape of the White Cross area, but Commissioner Steve Yuhasz, also seeing his first transfer station, said trees would shield it from view.

"The only part that you will see is driveway going into it," Yuhasz said. "Until you've seen one, it's hard to believe it could be as clean as this operation is."

Yuhasz said the real impact, if any, would be traffic. Garbage trucks pick up trash from residences and businesses and then dump it in the second story of the Greensboro depot.

Based on traffic figures at the county's Eubanks Road landfill, a transfer station on N.C. 54 would mean an average of 45 garbage trucks and a dozen tractor-trailers going in and out of the site each day.

"I'm not sure that if you're driving along 54 you're going to say, 'Oh my god, there's so much more traffic here than there used to be," Yuhasz said.

At the end of the tour Thursday, transfer-station opponent Bonnie Hauser conceded to Greensboro Environmental Services director Jeri Covington that the trash depot impressed her. "We're not underwhelmed by the facility," she said. "It just doesn't belong in the country."

But Commissioner Bernadette Pelissier thinks the impact on Bingham Township would be much less than residents expect.

"A lot of people at the public hearings think that they're going to be able to smell everything," she said after the tour. "You can smell some inside, but out here you can't smell a whiff."