Your description, Bill, of the way waste was disposed of a hundred years ago applies pretty much to 50 or 60 years ago. Except that you forgot the ashes. When I was a boy, in the 1940s, we had a coal furnace, as did most people. The ashes had to be shovelled out daily, into a metal container larger than a bucket. Yours truly got this job and once a week had to haul it up the cellar steps to the back yard where it would be emptied into an open truck by the ash men, who collected nothing else. Then there was the garbage truck, which collected the garbage (mostly organic, as you noted), also by dumping it into an open truck, which was really unpleasant in the summer. I can't for the life of me recall what happened to the trash such as paper, glass, tin cans, etc. which didn't go into the garbage. There must have been yet a third truck which collected that.
During the war, of course, unused cooking grease was collected in tin cans and taken to the neighborhood grocery store, where it was collected for the war effort. Same for the cans. When you opened a can, you saved the top; when the can was emptied, you cut out the bottom and flattened the can (with the top & bottom inside) and took that to the grocery as well, to be collected and melted down.
