The 3 R's.

Re-use, reduce, recycle.

We are trying our best to follow the rules of best practice when it comes to waste management.  It is one thing that Canada has taken on quite successfully, barring a few glaring omissions.  I believe the blue box system is nationwide which allows us to recycle glass, plastic, paper, and cardboard.  Our black bag garbage system for all other refuse only happens every second week (although we are allowed up to six bags to be placed on the sidewalk - if we place all six, just how much waste are we accumulating - and our household is guilty of doing that occasionally - particularly with visitors, or after we have geared up for a clean up.). The brown bag for garden waste comes in real handy and allows us to forego a trip to the municipal dump to get rid of the offending items ourselves.  Finally, the latest in the line-up is the green box which took some getting used to in the beginning, but is working quite smoothly for us now.  It allows us to place kitchen compost in compostable liners to be picked up by garbage collection each week.  Apart from the chore of sorting and getting to kerbside garabage disposal is a fairly painless operation that hopefully is having a positive effect on our Canadian environment and the world in general. 

What they haven't yet figured out is the small problem of trucking some our waste to the States.  I think that each community should be responsible for disposal of it's own waste within that community - we should not be transferring the problem elsewhere, even if it is easy dollars for both donor and recipient.

The most difficult to control of all, is our society's consumer driven quest, that is coupled with our propensity to own more and more goods.  The worst part of consumerism is the lack of quality and the built-in fail mechanisms that keep us on the hamster wheel of continuous replacement - my grandmother's washing machine lasted all her married life; while mine is lucky to make it to five or ten years, whilst I shell out huge sums of money for warranty insurance services (that inevitably do not amount to anything due to the number of exclusionary factors that always seem to crop up in the fine print).

Hopefully, in time we will become more discerning shoppers, and more vociferous in our demands for quality.
C'est la vie.