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The Toronto Star yesterday editorialized in favor of building a modern incinerator to burn the city's trash and produce energy.

Coupled with Toronto Mayor David Miller's recent brash (some say heavy-handed) move to buy a large landfill in southwestern Ontario, plus a recent statement by one of Miller's top rivals in the upcoming mayoral election favoring a pay-as-you-throw garbage system for the city, as well as a handful of other recent news items, and it's clear that waste disposal has become a front-burner issue in Toronto.

If this trend keeps rolling after the election, maybe Toronto and Ontario will actually come to grips with their looming trash crisis, and their long cross-border staredown with Michigan will fade into memory.

The New York Daily News published a profile Monday on New York University anthopology professor Robin Nagle, a woman who takes trash disposal very seriously, to the point of having worked as a New York sanitation employee.

Nagle, who is working toward establishing a city sanitation museum to honor New York's (other) finest, is a walking treasure trove of trash trivia.

Did you know, for example, that in Tokyo people separate recyclables into 27 categories, two of which are socks that match and socks that don't?

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.