first of all waste can be counted in two ways… the first is the waste produced during the production of materials. take a can for example. by recycling 1kg of cans you can save 6kg of bauxite ore. to get that ore you would have to dig(mine it) this alone creates waste and uses energy. the energy used to recycyle is about 5% of what it usualy takes to produce a can from raw material… now with technology as good as it is we can make 34 cans out of one pound of aluminium throw those cans in a landfill and it takes up alot of space but recycle them and they can be used over and over. Aluminium is able to be recycled indefinately so you can imagine that if we stopped throwing away and started recycling we could decrease the amount of landfill space used just by cans. don’t for get Glass, Steel, Plastics, Rubber and Paper. we can also reuse the Concrete and asphalt on our roads etc.
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/recycle.htm
http://www.earth911.org
http://www.nrc-recycle.org

These links are US based but they still give you the general Idea.