San Francisco: home to one of the country's most ambitious zero waste programs.

San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom said the numbers speak volumes about the citizens' participation in recycling.

"We're about to come out in few months with numbers that will show us over 70 percent," Newsom said.

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Compare that to just 28 percent of Austin's trash, and the rest gets buried at a landfill.

"There's no reason you can't increase recycling rates to 50 plus percent in just a few years," Newsom said. "It only took us a few years to ramp up."

So why is San Francisco so far ahead when it comes to eliminating waste?

One big reason is that Austin's city-owned recycling center is a fraction of the size.

Seven days a week, 700 tons of glass, plastic, aluminum, cardboard and paper get sorted, smashed and loaded at San Francisco's plant.

In Austin, that number is less than 100 tons per day.

About 70 miles north of San Francisco, you'll find another reason why the city is recycling more than Austin: composting. In fact, it's a service the City of Austin doesn't even offer.

Every day, the amount of food scraps and yard waste composted from San Francisco weighs as much as two 747 Boeing jumbo jets.

The private waste company that collects all of the city's garbage, NorCal Waste Systems, said much of what you might think is garbage is actually recyclable.

"When we look at a pile of what most people would consider garbage, 90 to 95 percent of it is something that can be either recycled or composted," Robert Reed of NorCal Waste Systems said. "We see resources."

Those resources add to NorCal's bottom line.

"We pay the garbage company the more they recycle," Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city's environmental department said. "Businesses pay less the more they recycle."

To collect so much trash to recycle, the mayor said they make things obvious.

"What we do is simply use different bins to make it obvious where people dispose of their waste," Newsom said.

It's simple enough that everyone in San Francisco, including businesses, gets three cans: green for compostables, blue for anything recyclable and black for trash. The bigger the black can, the more you pay.

Here in Austin, the city only collects residential recyclables. Businesses and apartment complexes must rely on private companies.

San Francisco is home to more than 3,500 restaurants, and all of them are required to recycle.

"People want to walk into an establishment where their food is, number one, not farmed raised, and the business does have sustainable business practices associated with it and that we are leaving a smaller footprint on our planet," restaurant owner Paul Lynn said.

San Francisco's mayor had some advice for Austin when it comes to making that footprint smaller.

"Demand change," Newsom said. "Demand policy changes. Demand accountability, not just to ideas and rhetoric but to follow through and action."

Action and changes are on there way to Austin, but we're still years behind San Francisco when it comes to zero waste.