All landfills are hazards to us and are a blight, but at this time they are the best option for us unti we figire out how to eliminate the trash we generate or cut it way down.
Whether most people could grow some of their own food depends on where they live and what resources are available to them. If you have 100 families living in an apartment building and space enough for 20 of them to grow food, not everyone could do that.
My children, now in their 40's, were taught about recycling when they were in grade school in the 1970's and recycling still has not caught on, because we lack the commitment to do that. Not only is recycling not a priority but packaging has become less recyclable today than ever. We did a far better job of recycling material during WWII then we are today.
There are many places that, back in the 1970's, did large scale composting, but because people would not buy the end result those projects ceased. Until we, as individuals, convince our Extension Service people to first suggest using compost rather than synthetic fertilizers, very few of todays gardeners will make that change and create a market for compost.
One of the really large bones of contention at the conference on global warming, as well as at Kioto, was and is who will pay for the changes necessary to reduce pollution. Far too many people are of the opinion that simply because they produce the problem they should not be responsible for solving it. In some instances there is a recycling fee imposed on some products that can be recycled and that kind of fee should be imposed on everything, except if a manufacturer opts to package the product they make in excessive packaging and then the manufacturer should pay an extra fee, that comes out of profits, to cover the cost of recycling that excess packaging.
The place to start is with your elected representatives. Does your local unit of government have restrictive ordinances that prohibit composting? Get them changed. Does your state prohibit yard waste from landfills? If so many people still need to be educated on what that means since lots of yard waste still goes to landfills, by people that claim ignorance.

All the landfills in my county are closed; the trash gets shipped to a plant and burnt. The ash gets trucked to florida for citrus fertilizer. Clearly all of that requires a lot more energy to accomplish.

The issue is how much trash we generate as a society. That's the thing to focus on. Composting is obviously a good thing. Converting the current waste stream to usable compost on a commercial scale will require big profits. Those cannot exist when chemical fertilizers are cheap.