San Jose CA has a pretty good recycling program for household wastes. In addition to that we have a large garden and we grow 90% of all our vegetables. Of the vegetables we buy, 50% are organic and/or locally grown. We compost the garden trimmings, leaves and etc and add almost all our wet kitchen garbage to the compost pile. We also do worm composting. One of our two cars is a Honda Civic Hybrid (about 45 mpg) and the other is an older Civic that gets about 28 mpg. We're only keeping the older car until electric cars are less costly and then we will buy one to replace it.