The Oil Drum

Conventional agriculture harvests crops from fields and replaces the non-renewable nutrients removed by the process with fertilizers of various kinds. When a homeowner (stupidly) cuts their lawn and gathers up leaves just to ship the "waste"  to a landfill, they too have to replace the nutrients removed with fertilizers.

Better systems would use "smaller loops" to return the nutrients to the soil. With the homeowner, a mulching lawn-mower (or better yet, a reel mower) and a compost bin results in a tight loop. For the farmer, going vertical and doing as much on-farm processing can keep much of the nutrients on the farm (as "waste" by-products of processing) so that they can be spread back on the fields. I often see trucks headed for the landfill with stuff that I'd rather see dumped on my property so that I could spread it on my fields, possibly after composting.

This is one of the reasons that I would liek to see a more agrarian lifestyle in the future. It has relatively tight nutrient loops. These smaller loops can have much smaller energy demand.

Some years ago, during the mid 1990's, our fair city of 70,000  souls decided to get out of the sanitation (garbage pickup and handling) business.  They let all the sanitation workers go, sold their trucks, closed the various "drop off" dump sites located around the area (where you could take larger items, like old washing machines, etc), closed the city dump, and hired a private sanitation company to take over the duties, including trucking the garbage to a new facility 3 counties away (about 50 miles).
Everyone got a single new green plastic wheeled bin to put their trash in, instead of the self-provided trash cans of various types, and garbage pickup switched from twice a week to once a week. Additionally, non-household garbage (such as lawn debris) would now be collected every other week, instead of was now picked up once a month, instead of biweekly. On top of it all, everyone's sanitation bill went up nearly 20%.
The upside of it all was that this company gave everyone a small recycling bin, and was going to sort all garbage and recycle as much of it as possible, as part of their contract. They were even going to sell those recycled materials (such as aluminum, glass, newspaper, etc) for reuse.  As a 'green' solution for the whole city, most applauded the effort.

Some years passed, and around 2003 it came to light that the recycling center operated by this sanitation company had been a revenue drain on the company, and they had closed it soon after it opened, years previously. Instead of sorting and recycling the materials collected by the city's citizenry, they had been simply been dumping it back in with all the other garbage.
Needless to say, our citizens were inscenced, they had been asked to pay more and accept less service in the name of the environment. Politicians ran around like chicken little. The city sued the company for breach of contract, to which it responded by going belly up (bankruptcy).  
The city ended up hiring another sanitation company, which continues pretty much the same practices as its predecessor.
Those recycling bins are now mostly used to store gardening supplies and what have you.