Let's get a couple of things straight.

You don't call this place a garbage dump. Yes, trucks come to Commissioners St. filled with garbage and yes, they dump their loads in great big stinking piles on the tipping floor.

But this is a Transfer Station, so-called because it is here that our pork chop bones and coffee grounds, our busted hockey sticks and dirty kitty litter, our broken mayo jars and sad mattresses are dumped, pushed into piles which are then dropped down fetid chutes, rammed into trucks and hauled off - transferred - to Michigan.

Maz Cordeiro is a TSO.

No, wise guy, he is not a Toronto Symphony Orchestra, he is a Transfer Station Operator, although you might think the smell that greets him on the early shift is symphonic: I detect the sickly-sweet bass notes of rotting meat, the bright high notes of orange peels and rancid fish.

PHOTOGALLERY: GARBAGE DUMP

The job of a TSO is to spot arriving trucks, sweep up, and dump crud down a chute with a front-end loader. The field of ops is a floor the size of a small-town arena.

Today, Maz - short for Nomezio - starts the morning shift as a spotter. A rusty truck rolls up, filled with shredded rubber from a radial tire recycling plant; the load looks like a mountain of steel wool.

Maz checks the driver's ticket, eyeballs the floor, notes where the front-end loader is working and, with a wave of his hand, gestures to the driver: back it up here, bring it in on an angle, back'er up, let's go.

He has an eloquent hand.

He wears a mask when he works, not because of the smell but because, "They did tests. The stuff in the air in this place, if you breathed it for any length of time ..." He lets it hang.

You don't need a test to know what he means.

The garbage that came in overnight is piled high enough to dwarf a three-storey house. For a description, think of what you set out on the curb; multiply that a million times.

What's the oddest thing he's seen? "Brand-new toys. Furniture from movie sets. Last year a truck came in leaking blood from the back end. We had half the place shut down, and swarms of police. Turned out it was animal blood."

I spot a filthy little quarter on the floor. Maz laughs. "We have to sign a paper saying we won't take anything." On more than one occasion, they've had to halt work so a restaurateur could search for a bag of absently-discarded cash.

The stench seems to thicken as the guy in the front-end loader bullies his way into the pile. "It's worse at the bottom because it's had a chance to cook." Does he ever get used to it? Would you?

Mid-way through the morning, after a dizzy parade of half-tons, vans and garbage trucks, Maz takes a turn in the front-end loader. And you can tell a lot about a man by the way he works: As a spotter, he makes the big trucks do his bidding, he creates no jams or bottlenecks, the work flows around him - he's a good traffic cop.

But when it's his turn on the front-end loader, he's a skater: he snatches a bucketful of rags and busted concrete, and in one smooth and fluid gesture, wheels and turns and dumps it down the chute - not easy to do with grace, considering that the big machine has a bucket big enough to swallow your car and tires higher than my head. What's it sound like? Pop, crunch, snort, squeak, snap, and beep, beep, beep as he backs up.

Last year, the Commissioners St. station handled nearly 200,000 metric tonnes of residential and industrial crap, along with 20,000 tonnes of glass, aluminum tins and plastic from recycling bins.

Where there's muck, there's brass: A tonne of crushed pop tins sells for $1,700; a tonne of white glass jars sells for $30. As for recycled plastic, the price fluctuates: last year a tonne was worth $395; this year it sells for $110; not long ago it went for $650. Go figger.

Under the chutes, an empty truck backs onto the end of the compactor. There it waits, locked in place until enough crud is dumped down the chute to make a load.

Maz knows how much he's dumped because there's a weight-sensitive device in his bucket and a screen inside the cab; he gets a read-out of the weight of each bucket, and the screen keeps a running total; he dumps until he reaches the max. Then the compactor - a great big greasy piston - pushes the trash deep into the truck and packs it tight. And then it's Michigan, here we come.

A dozen grackles and one or two gulls fly through an open window, as if borne on shafts of light. They scurry nimbly amid the rusty, dripping, stinking big-wheeled traffic. The birds find specks of food in the filth of the tipping floor. "In the summer," says Maz, "the maggots are like caviar to them."

Make you squeamish?

Here is the stuff of family legend: When we were kids, my parents asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I forget what I said, we all forget what I said because my little brother - he was five years old at the time - blurted, "I want to be a garbage man." We all laughed.

I don't, not any more.

My little brother was enchanted by the power of the great big snorting trucks, and hard work done by strong men, and when the trucks had lumbered off the neighbourhood was clean.

The thing about this kind of work? My brother knew it as a kid and Maz knows it as a man with kids of his own: It isn't the job. It's how you do it. Here comes another load.

See him skate.