Well, the point he makes is that the same is true for the other statistics. It'd probably be cheaper environmentally for a garbage truck to pick up all your garbage for instance, rather than each person traveling to the recycling center themselves.
I've lived in a couple of villages/towns/cities in Sweden, and the garbage trucks do pick up the sorted household garbage. Recycling centers are for stuff like old furniture, used engine oil, etc.
I guess you could implement a system for that too. Inform the city when you have less common items to throw away and when the quota for your neighborhood is full, a truck gets dispatched to pick it up. Would require some extra infrastructure I guess, but it might be worth it.
Here in Portugal - or at least, in many municipalities - you can call up the city and arrange for them to pick it up at a certain day, for free (yes, it's paid by taxes, yada yada).
They take furniture, appliances and green waste (from gardens and such).
In Australia, virtually no one travels to the "recycling center themselves" - we have three bins (green waste, recyclables [paper/card/plastics/tins/etc], general). General waste is picked up from the kerb each week, while the other two are picked up on alternate weeks. Even accounting for the more frequent pick-ups of general waste, I still produce more recycling (wine bottles, etc) or green waste (weeding, pruning, etc) than general rubbish.
