As the clock ticks down toward the closing date for a key British Columbia landfill site, Metro Vancouver residents are under pressure to decide what to do with some of the 1.5 million tonnes of garbage that they throw out every year.

Roughly half of that material is dumped in a landfill site in Delta, B.C. About one fifth is burned in a Burnaby, incerator. The rest is shipped to a landfill site in Cache Creek, in central B.C.

However, the fact that so much Vancouver garbage goes to Cache Creek is about to become a problem for the region as the landfill is expected to be full by 2010.

A plan to ship that garbage to Ashcroft, B.C. was recently killed by the provincial government. Now Metro Vancouver is considering sending it to Washington State, an idea that is meeting resistance from politicians like North Vancouver District Councillor Alan Nixon..

On Monday night, North Vancouver district councillors were set to vote on the question of whether Metro Vancouver should be required to keep its garbage in B.C.

Ahead of the vote, Nixon said he wants it to stay in B.C. Sending garbage south to the U.S., he says, will put it out of sight of Vancouver residents, making them much less motivated to reduce the amount of garbage they produce.

"It takes us off the hook. It takes every citizen in metro Vancouver potentially off the hook about being devoted to or buying into the need to reduce the waste that's going into the stream right now," he said.

Cache Creek mayor John Ranta wants to expand the existing landfill, because 120 jobs will be lost if the site is shut down.

B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner, is also backing a B.C. solution, claiming that sending the garbage to the U.S. is not the only available option.

"I've asked my ministry staff to talk to Metro Vancouver and to obtain whatever documents or reports they're relying on that leads them to conclude that there are no other viable options in British Columbia because my first choice is not to export garbage from out province," he said.

A decision on the garbage issue is expected to be made by October.

With a report by CTV British Columbia's Dag Sharman