Sure, you can improve efficiencies and technologies. You can advocate government mandates. You can hope that people will develop enough of a conscience that they'll recycle because they want to make the world a better place.

Those all can work under the right circumstances. But for my money, a well-intentioned bribe works best.

In this issue we take a close look at residential recycling. Among the issues we look at are pay-as-you-throw programs and commingled collection. Both concepts demonstrate a lot of success. At the core, those concepts are based, respectively, on making it financially worth people's while and making it easier.

Pay as you throw, in particular, makes sense in so many ways. It makes the decision on recycling predominately one of self interest. You pay less if you choose to recycle. You pay more if you choose not to.

And in these times when there is more pressure than ever for governments to reduce costs, it puts the decision primarily on the individual citizen. He or she can controls costs as they please. It makes it a lot harder for the public to complain about the government wasting our tax dollars or requiring tax revenue we'd rather not give them.

It might not be the most altruistic method. It doesn't further the idea of recycling as a moral good. But as ample evidence has shown, the bottom line is that it increases recycling. And isn't that the point?

Commingled recycling has the same practical effect. Here the appeal isn't to a person's pocketbook, it's to their laziness. OK, to be nicer, to their motivation. The reality is that a large segment of the population just isn't going to recycle if it gets too complicated, like having to decide which number plastics they can recycle and which they can't, etc.

With commingled instead, throw all the recyclables in one container basically and let the collectors sort it out. This means more challenges from a processing end and certainly more potential processing cost up front. But like pay as you throw, it gets results, in the form of much higher participation rates.

This isn't even touching on rewards programs like the enormously successful Recyclebank, which offers discounts in conjunction with local retailers. Again, these are concepts that have worked extremely well in a variety of locations.

The common theme is that people are much more likely to recycle if they think there's something in it for them.

This isn't to say that incentive-based recycling systems by themselves will fulfill every recycling advocate's dreams, or that other approaches aren't also effective.

But government mandates are always going to be controversial and subject to the vagaries of the economy and politics. And how many of us really like to be forced to do something? Recycling because it's good for the earth is a great ideal, but realistically, those arguments usually lead to only limited achievements.

But make someone believe recycling is truly in their own best interest, and you probably have a long-term convert.

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.