It was teatime that did it - the third or fourth hot drink of the day, bought in a paper cup with a plastic top, some biscuits in a plastic wrapper, cup and wrapper going not to the bin but to the hoard of detritus growing around my keyboard - and a sudden revulsion. It's not as if I don't recycle. I do, pretty faithfully. But not all of the pile was recyclable, and in some ways that wasn't the point: I was suddenly thinking about just how much of this there must be - per day, per week, per year, per person. And how unnecessary, how thoughtlessly profligate it all was. Obviously the thing to do in such circumstances is rub your nose in your own failings, and so I decided, the following week, to keep all my rubbish for a day; have it photographed, and analysed by experts. Face up to it.

Worries about what we throw away, and how we do it, aren't new. In something like 500BC, Athens moved municipal dumping well away from its city walls; Britain's first dustmen were Romans; we all know, from school lessons or from films, about the cess-filled streets of medieval, even 19th-century London. In 1874, Britain discovered the waste incinerator, and a year later, London acquired a sewerage system; a quarter of a century after that came the widespread use of landfill: all along, as Richard Girling puts it in his book Rubbish! Dirt on Our Hands and Crisis Ahead, "waste policy, as far as there was one, was driven by the politics of disgust". Now, increasingly, it is driven by fear of the revenge our planet will inflict for our thousands of years of negligence. Driven, too, by sheer scale.

For there are more of us than ever before, and we live more closely packed together. Multiply my plastic cup or two, a sweet wrapper or three, by more than 60 million Britons, every day of every year, add industrial waste, electronic waste, hospital waste ... In 2004, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the United Kingdom produced about 335m tonnes of waste; every hour we throw away enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall. Last year, 5.5m tonnes of household waste were collected in England alone. Each of Britain's 29m households, says Mark Barthel, an expert in waste reduction for the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), throws away the weight-equivalent of one teenage elephant each year. Imagine, he says, how much space 29 million teenage elephants would take up (that is, if they weren't buried in landfill, recycled, or shipped to China). Each of us produces an average of seven times our own weight in waste each year. According to figures for 2004-5 (the latest available from the Environment Agency), the east of England, which traditionally has accepted large amounts of London's waste, had only three years' landfill capacity remaining at current rates of disposal; in London it was four years, and Wales five. The full sites will, and must, be replaced by new ones, but these figures are a graphic illustration of the scale of the problem.

Some of the culprits are well known, and are beginning, slowly, to be dealt with, though in the face of mountains of Styrofoam-cradled electrical goods (not to mention pears), we may feel that a few retailers' gestures on packaging are long, long overdue. But, says Barthel, some packaging is necessary, and retailers have "this fine balancing act between providing packaging which not only protects the food but also presents consumers with key pieces of information, such as whether it contains nuts, cooking instructions, storage instructions. I suspect we'll see a lot more produce packed loosely, because that seems to me to be a fairly easy target, though the challenge then for retailers is that the transit packaging is robust enough." If there is the will, adds Chris Davey from Recycle Now, a national consumer campaign run by Wrap, "we can design out [of products] a lot of materials that are currently difficult to recycle."

But there are more subtle, rather more difficult things to deal with, too - our attitudes and habits. There is the besetting sin indicated by my sorry little pile, for instance - reaching for convenience. It began with my first meal of the day: a croissant in a paper bag, coffee in a paper cup with a plastic lid, a clear plastic glass of cranberry juice. And, doing what I do, a pile of newspapers. Lunch was soup from the canteen in a cardboard bowl, eaten with a plastic spoon, bread spread (using a plastic knife, of course) with individually wrapped butter. And then there were the Starburst wrappers, biscuit wrappers, sugar sachets, a tea bag ... It was actually better, in some ways, than usual. There is often a polystyrene box from the canteen. And all of it, 24 hours of observation revealed, was acquired at work - at home there are mugs and glasses and pots and plates, and they, of course, can be washed and reused, a point gently but firmly made when my heap was scrutinised by a panel of rubbish analysts: Barthel, Davey and Joy Blizzard, from the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee.

"Invest in a mug and a spoon," said Blizzard. And if you must use a plastic cup and plastic lids, Davey said, why not also use an organisation such as Save a Cup, which will collect them from your place of work and turn them into such things as rulers and pens?

If tea bags end up in landfill, they do biodegrade eventually. But, in the absence of oxygen, this process produces methane, which is 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide (over a period of 100 years); and "38% of the UK's methane emissions come from landfill sites," says Barthel - obviously a climate change no-no. Instead, he suggests I compost them, which is easier said than done in an office. And I had not realised one of the effects of recycling was to cut CO2 emissions: according to the International Aluminium Institute, recycling aluminium - from drinks cans or foil - is 95% more energy-efficient than making aluminium from raw bauxite. With steel, the metals giant Corus claims, the figure is 75%. According to Wrap, recycling in Britain is now the equivalent of taking 3.5m cars off the road in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

There are, as I suspected, things in my pile that cannot be dealt with: Starburst wrappers are laminates, made of different polymers, and because these polymers vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and are present in such small volumes, there is no market for them as recyclates, quite apart from the challenge of sorting them. This applies to most chocolate bar wrappers and to all crisp packets. Do not be fooled by the fact that many look as if they are made of foil, which is recyclable: all you've go to do is squash them in your hands. If they slowly regain their shape, it's nothing doing.

Some of the trouble begins before we even get to this point. I grew up in Ethiopia, where used plastic bags, cans and bottles were valuable enough to be bought and sold, providing scratched livelihoods in themselves: throwing away a jam jar that might conceivably be used for something still causes a little stab of guilt, guilt that's quieted, but not entirely stilled, by being able to put it in a green box; for those who grew up in plenty, as those born in postwar Britain have done, that guilt must be learned.

Some degree of waste is unavoidable, and no one should pretend otherwise; the torrents of it that we produce, however, say something about the way we live. "Junk," says Girling, "is not so much a by-product of modern life as the foundation of it. We have a daily diet of junk mail, junk food . . . Good, workable mobile phones become junk as soon as manufacturers launch their new ranges. Clothes become junk every spring and autumn, as fashion changes its mantle." (More like every six weeks or so, I would counter.)

When it comes to food, it appears that we are dealing with a kind of epidemic of ineptitude. People do not check cupboards and write lists before they shop, says Barthel (who is working on a campaign to reduce food waste), so they duplicate things and are easily enticed by in-store advertising, buying one to get one "free". Food is wasted because it is not stored properly - most fridges are set too high, the average being 6.64C, when it should be between 0C and 5C. About 60% of homes cook too much for each meal, and leftovers get thrown out. Students and young professionals aged 16-35 are more likely to waste food than anyone else. Young families are next in line; a category called, somewhat creepily, social renters - meaning people in housing association or council property - are next, partly because they do not necessarily have freezers or much storage space. According to the Food Standards Agency, only 35% of us understand that a use-by date applies to chilled and perishable food; even fewer, 24%, understand that "best before" means there may be a reduction in prime quality, not that the product will be dangerous - so we throw out lots of perfectly edible food. Even the most basic home economics skills are atrophying. Increasingly we suffer, in a brilliant phrase used by one of Barthel's research colleagues, from "food blindness": an inability to look at a cupboard full of ingredients and work out how they might be combined.

When that is added to another sort of blindness - a failure of imagination - the result is obvious. We no longer see waste flowing through the streets and, except in very rural places, we don't have to cart it away ourselves. It goes into a kitchen bin, then to dustbins, and thence out of mind - until the landfills fill, not in some un-imaginable future, but in the next half-decade.

Increasingly, of course, Britain is recycling: 59% of people in England are now what Wrap calls committed recyclers, compared to 45% less than two years ago; but in 2004/05, that accounted for only 26.7% of waste: significant, but still a curiously unimpressive figure.

We cannot pretend that we are not in trouble, and a large part of the solution lies in taking personal responsibility: what each of us does with the waste we produce, and how aware we are that we are doing it. "The ideal state," says Davey, "is where we are only sending for disposal that which cannot possibly be recycled or reused." I know what I have to do, for starters. Bring a mug to work. And a spoon. And maybe, if I can get slightly more organised, scan my cupboards and make my own lunch.

One day of Aida's rubbish

Paper coffee cup with plastic top

Cardboard bowl for soup. (There is often a polystyrene box for food from the canteen that I eat at my desk.)

Starburst wrappers

Newspapers - 10

Paper bag for croissant

Cardboard carrier for cups

Clear plastic cup for fruit juice

Biscuit wrapper

5 colour printouts of photos

Butter wrapper

Tea bag

Paper napkin

Plastic spoon

Stirrer

Sugar wrappers

Press release for a glow-in-the-dark bra

· This article was amended on Sunday June 24 2007. Methane is 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 (over a period of 100 years) and not 23%, as was stated in the article above. This has been corrected.