We don’t call it the dump anymore, not officially anyway. We don’t even call it the landfill, because our trash is no longer buried in the ground. For the past two decades, Islanders have been disposing of their trash by taking or sending it to a transfer facility where it is eventually carted off Island to incinerators and recycling centers on the mainland.

Whatever we call the place, the time-honored New England tradition of going to the dump on weekends is alive and well on the Vineyard. The main transfer facility in Edgartown operated by the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse Disposal and Resource Recovery District is a prime example. Go there on any Saturday or Sunday and you will find a true cross section of the Island: contractors in pickup trucks, homeowners in dented sedans, weekenders in shiny new cars coated with a fine layer of dust from Vineyard dirt roads. Throwing away trash may be the last great equalizer.

At the Edgartown facility you can recycle a wide array of stuff for free, and for various fees ranging from a couple of dollars to a couple of hundred dollars you can toss barrels, bags or truckloads of trash and dispose of your yard waste, old mattresses and broken appliances. It’s a friendly, efficient place where they offer biscuits to your dog. Several times a year there are specially designated hazardous waste collection days when people can bring in old paint, paint remover and other materials that need special handling for disposal.

There are trash drop-off locations in every Island town, but the central facility is in Edgartown. Smaller sites in West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah send their trash to the Edgartown facility for sorting and shipping to the mainland. The refuse district itself is a four-town government entity with a committee made up of appointed members from each town: Aquinnah, Edgartown, Chilmark and West Tisbury. For political reasons that have long since faded from memory, Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven are not members of the district. Those two towns have curbside pickup and use independent haulers to send it off-Island.

But in every town, with minor variations, our trash is handled in much the same way, ultimately ending up on the mainland for incineration or recycling.

And we generate enormous amounts of it. According to its website, the refuse district handles some eleven thousand tons of waste and construction debris annually. Some nine thousand tons is incinerated while the rest is recycled.

As the Island continues to change from a rural outpost to a more suburban-like place, the refuse district is seeing changes of its own. At the central facility in Edgartown long lines are common on weekends and the staff is sometimes hard pressed to keep up with demand. To that end district managers are proposing an expansion plan aimed at reorganizing the facility and improving the methods for handling waste, including by separating commercial and household users. The district owns enough land around its central facility to accommodate expansion; the estimated cost of the work will be about two and a half million dollars.

At a special town meeting this week Chilmark voters agreed to pay their share of the cost. Similar requests will come before Aquinnah, Edgartown and West Tisbury in the months ahead.

The upgrade is clearly needed and the towns should approve it. But the discussion should not stop there. The Island’s last comprehensive solid waste study was done in 1987. Technologies and methods for trash disposal have changed dramatically since then. As part of its expansion plan the refuse district is reexamining disposal methods with an eye toward more reuse through such practices as composting. Massachusetts law now requires large restaurants and businesses to compost their organic waste, and these requirements are expected to eventually include households.

Refuse district leaders, who have already begun small sustainable programs that include shell recycling, say they want to get ahead of the curve and be ready for these changes. They also want to be ready to accommodate the needs of an expanded regional district if Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven decide to rejoin.

It’s time for that to happen. The Island should be united in a common effort to reduce the amount of waste we generate and send to the mainland. Taking a fresh look at garbage is not a glamorous task, but it’s a critical one, and we hope leaders in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs will see the value of joining the effort.