I think I am on the less wasteful end of the scale by American standards (which is not sayng much).

My wife and I eat almost every single piece of food we buy. Very very little is not eaten. Also, I have several different composting systems that I use to recycle almost all food waste into usable comopst, so even if it is not eaten, it is not thrown away. I can process all the inedible trimmings off of fruits and vegetables that you make when you are cooking, and I can also process food that has spoiled, cooked food, even meat and cheese, into usable compost. The only food-related items I cannot process at home are things like bones, or very greasy items, or things that have really putrified --- however my municipal garbage service provides a green "organics" bin for that material, and they compost it in an industrial composting facility. So even that portion does not truly go to waste --- it goes to fertilize California crops.

I also recycle almost all of my yard waste into compost as well. The only yard waste that I do not compost here and reuse on site is weeds that have gone to seed, diseased plants, and very large woody items that are too large for me to chip up here on site. However, all of that stuff that I cannot process goes into the green bin as well and is composted at an industrial site.

I am also an aggressive recycler. My wife calls it "pawing through the garbage." Believe me, nothing gets thrown in the garbage if it can be recycled. And if it does inadvertently end up there, I pull it out when I fill the bins on garbage night. This city has a great recycling program, and you can throw all your paper, glass, metal cans, aluminum foil, and plastics of different types into one recycling bin, and it is all sorted at the transfer station and recycled.

The biggest challenge was what to do with the nasty used kleenex, used paper towels and paper napkins, and food-stained paper, like paper plates and pizza boxes. Well, that can all go into the "organics" bin now too, and it gets recycled into compost, believe it or not. So now I gather all that crap too.

Each week, all of the unusable garbage that my wife and I generate fits into one plastic shopping bag. It is probably less than a half a cubic foot and consists mostly of unrecycleable plastics. That's it. That one bag is all that goes into the landfill from this house on a typical week. The only exception is when something unusual happens and we buy something that comes in a lot of packaging. Around Christmas there is always a lot of styrofoam that I haven't figured out what to do with yet.