I have been a fanatic for recycling since anyone even started talking about it. I've used cloth napkins & hankies for 25 years. Wash em in HOT water. We have a really good & comprehensive recycling program in Oneida County, NY. I have to sort my trash several different ways, but it's all picked up at the curb weekly.

New York has deposits on soda & beer bottles so those are returned for the nickel or given to some organization collecting them for fund raising.

Container sort: glass bottles, plastic containers up to symbols with 6, foil, cans.
Paper sort: pretty much any clean paper or cardboard except freezer boxes due to platic coatings.
Yard waste: Just put it at the curb, picked up separately & hauled to a central compost facility
Garbage: None of the above, mostly things with food waste, goes into specially purchased bags. 10 gal. bag is $.85, larger is $1.35 (I'm not sure of it's capacity) I usually put a 10 gal. bag out every other week.
There's a facility for dropping off hazardous or questionable waste like old batteries, thermometers, paints, etc. Its open pretty frequently including Sat. mornings, unlike some areas I've heard of where you get one or two chances a year.

I always have grocery bags in the car. I both reuse brown paper bags until they break and use my own cloth bags. I also use my own bags for general shopping. I still manage to collect a fair number of plastic shopping bags. I save them & periodically return them to the a grocery store that has a plastic bag drop off.

My mom was like Mmario's in making us wash plastic bags, etc. Unlike him & his siblings, I continued the practice. I can still remember her complaining when soda started being sold in non-returnable containers, "I'm paying for the packaging." I reuse small plastic bags so often, that I need to buy a new box every 5 years or so.

I'm not composting because I'm not too sure about the logistics of it. My daily newspaper comes either in a plastic bag or with a rubber band around it. I'd like to figure out a way to have them reused.

Back in the old days garbage at dumps was burned & capacity was not terribly limited. All kinds of awful toxins were released that way & bad things were leaching into the ground water. Now the landfills are sealed, which helps with the local pollution issues, but means no air gets in to break organic materials down.