Let’s take a moment to think about the politics of garbage, and the garbage of politics.

The City Council is close to a vote on the single most critical long-term health issue facing New York: ending the city’s unconscionable practice of concentrating garbage transfer stations in a handful of black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.

The council is considering Mayor Bloomberg’s Solid Waste Management Plan, which will lock the city’s trash-removal policy in place for decades.

The issue is simple. Right now, New York City gets rid of its garbage by loading it onto 18-wheel trucks at waste-transfer stations. The equivalent of a 7-mile-long convoy of tractor-trailers gets loaded with garbage and sent rumbling out of town every day, causing traffic congestion and tearing up city streets and roads.

An incredible 80 percent of the city’s garbage gets shipped out of just three neighborhoods: the South Bronx, southeast Queens and Greenpoint/Williamsburg. Manhattan, by contrast, has no waste transfer stations.

This is not just unfair, it’s deadly. The concentration of waste stations is a leading reason South Bronx residents suffer from some of the highest rates of asthma in America.

Mayor Bloomberg, after meeting with the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods and other environmental groups, proposed a creative solution to New York’s garbage trap: float the trash out on barges to cut down on truck traffic and make each borough ship its own waste.

Environmentalists initially hailed the plan to shift to marine transfer stations. So did political leaders, including Council Speaker Gifford Miller. But that was before election-year politics took hold. Now Miller has executed a kind of flip-flop, arguing against a concept he once publicly supported.

The problem is that one of the marine transfer stations would be on E. 91st Street. That’s in Miller’s home district on the East Side – which, incidentally, generates more garbage than any other part of Manhattan.

Miller – forced to choose between his well-heeled neighbors and protecting the health of low-income people all over the city – is trying to kill the 91st Street station. And given Miller’s power to hand out budgetary goodies to other council members, many of them – including members of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus – are joining him.

Council members who ordinarily fight long and loudly on behalf of their low-income black and Latino constituents, especially allies of Miller, have started dodging and hedging and mumbling on the question of backing the new sanitation plan.

An outrageous alternative is being floated that would leave the East Side untouched and put a new transfer station way up on W. 215th Street. East Side garbage would continue to be trucked to other people’s neighborhoods.

This is an issue that will define the political and moral stature of council members for years to come. Any politician willing to condemn hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to higher rates of disease and death should be exposed for what they are: unfit to serve in any public office.