How much waste does the average Kamloopian Produce?

I put a poll on my blog asking "How much waste does the average Kamloopian Produce?" In case you are not familiar with BC or Canada (I notice that there are lots of people from New Zealand visiting my blog), Kamloops is my home town, thus the term Kamloopian.

Okay... so the answer to my poll question is this: the average Kamloopian produces 1.2 tonnes of waste per year. Wow, thats a lot of garbage! And I can assure you that this information is pretty accurate as I calculated it myself. Well, not really, the City of Kamloops keeps pretty good records of what goes into the Mission Flats landfill and I did a little math (total waste/ total population = per capita waste generation).

Compare that to the waste generation rate in the State of California, 400 kg/capita, and it doesn't look very good.

Which leads to my next question, why do we (in Kamloops) produce so much more garbage than the people in California? Do they have better recycling? Are they poorer so they buy less stuff? Or are we just a bit more wasteful than our friends in the South?

If there is anyone out there from California, please enlighten us.  I welcome any comment on this subject so please feel free... I am all ears.