With suburban residents expressing concerns about a possible waste transfer station, this Daily Herald article explains how suburban garbage reaches its final destination:

The waste transfer station would allow filled garbage trucks to temporarily dump refuse on the ground. The refuse would be hauled away from the site by semi trucks to landfills, meaning no garbage would be stored at the West Chicago facility.

Suburbanites do not want to think about or smell garbage around their single-family homes. They want to be able to put out the cans, have it picked up quickly with little fuss or noise, and then taken away. All at minimal cost and inconvenience to their life.

Yet, Americans generate a lot of garbage. Packaging. Wasted food and food scraps. Plastic everything. Old clothes. Accumulated junk. The weekly garbage pick-up has to happen and the garbage has to go somewhere. Just keep it away from the nice residential neighborhoods.

Hence, the need for a waste transfer station. After making their daily rounds, the trucks need a central point where they can put their garbage. Landfills would not be acceptable near many suburban communities. The transfer station is just that: the garbage is transferred to another truck to take to the far-off landfill.

Of course, it may not always have been like this. The landfills used to be closer before the suburbs kept growing further and further out from the city. Not too far from the proposed waste transfer facility suburbanites can find old landfills now serving as parks.

Presumably, the current landfills are sufficiently far from suburban residences that the suburbanites have little knowledge of where the garbage goes and fewer people live near the new sites. All the suburbanites know is that the garbage is gone – until the next trash day.