After years of stagnation on the increasingly pressing issue of what to do with our trash, there's been a surprising flurry of activity lately.

What it all will come to, nobody yet knows. But it is encouraging to see so much movement on this critical matter, where for so long there was so little.

The existing Orange County landfill is expected to fill up and close in 2012. What then? The county was slow to fully grapple with the problem; an early search for a new landfill site, conducted with perhaps less vigor than would have been ideal, came up empty. Plan B is to build a waste transfer station, where trucks would bring the garbage to be loaded onto bigger trucks, which would haul it out of sight and out of mind, to a landfill somewhere outside Orange County. It's a less progressive solution, but it's the model we have in hand.

Where to put the transfer station? For a long time the options seemed to be Eubanks Road, where the landfill is now, and ... well, that was pretty much it. The commissioners voted to put the station there, but after a rousing outcry from the nearby Rogers Road neighborhood, they backtracked and re-opened the search for another site.

That process honed in on a tract in southwestern Orange County, and despite some drawbacks -- it's expensive and far from the population centers that produce most of the garbage and from the highways on which it will be trucked away -- in recent months the momentum has been steadily building toward that site.

Until about 10 days ago. That's when Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy tossed a potentially promising new idea into the pot: a tract on Millhouse Road next to the Town Operations Center. Since then, at least two additional possibilities have arisen, both of which would involve consolidating waste operations with neighboring counties -- one with Chatham County, the other with Durham.

The Millhouse Road idea drew immediate fire from some Rogers Road residents, although it's more than a mile away from Rogers Road and is outside the Historic Rogers Road Planning Area. That opposition shouldn't derail a thorough study of the site; none of the details have yet been outlined, but at first glance Millhouse Road appears to have some pluses. It's near the population center and the interstate, and it's already in public hands, which could save several million dollars -- savings that, as Foy pointed out, could help Rogers Road get the sewer hookups residents have long wanted as compensation for their decades of living next to the landfill.

That option is certainly worth exploring -- as are the other new wrinkles. Given the reality of the landfill's eventual closing, the county will soon have to pick a plan and stick with it. But we're not quite at that point yet. We still have an opportunity to come up not just with a plan, but with the best plan.