Do you, like Andie McDowell, in sex, lies and videotape, lie awake at night worrying about where all the garbage will go?

I have to confess, I occasionally do. Every bag of trash that I fill seems like another straw on the planet’s back. (A sign that I’m a hopeless liberal, probably.)

So it was anxiety-reducing to talk to people who are garbage geeks about what the future holds. As it turns out, it holds a lot of wrangling about what the ultimate garbage solution is, as I explore in my Vancouver magazine story.

At the end, I don’t think there is one solution and neither does anyone, really. A lot can be recycled — but perhaps not as much as we think. Much of what we now consider to be recycling is just garbage delayed one step. It’s recycled once … and THEN thrown away.

Some can be burned. But not everything. That means that what we’re likely to see in the foreseeable future is considerable pushing and pulling to arrive at the ratios for each, with a lot of new technology and processes and thinking about different ways to change the familiar.

Plus a lot of thinking about what we as humans are ultimately capable of. Can we invent the perfect solution? Can we change our own behaviour? Which is more likely?