www.roanoke.com

New in the Datasphere, recycling rates for the 74 Virginia municipal entities that handle your trash.

Our Roanoke area agencies all recycle something within a few percentage points one way or the other of a third of all their solid waste.

The source is the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's annual recycling reports, which are compliled from reports made by the municipal agencies themselves.

But some of these numbers, quite frankly, seem hard to believe.

They range wildly, from a rate of 7.6 percent in Northampton County to a rate of 55 percent in the town of Vienna. Can a locality, even a small one in a progressive, wealthy part of the state that produces just 12,000 tons of trash a year really recycle more than half of its waste?

Part of the explanation lies in the agencies' ability to get credits added to their rate for recycling of private waste and for waste source reduction efforts.

Then there's things like these numbers. Roanoke had a dramatic increase in the rate from 23 percent in 2005 to 37 percent in 2006. That sounds great, but the numbers also show reported total solid waste of 15,000 tons in 2005 compared to 80,000 tons in 2006. What?

There are similar increases in Roanoke County. It all seems to suggest some change in calculations. I can find no accounting for it in the text of the 2006 DEQ report. We couldn't have a 400 percent increase in garbage from one year to the next, could we?

I hate to undermine the reliablity of data I've posted in the DataSphere. Maybe there are good explanations for all this. Still, if something smells funny about the state's report on garbage, you ought to know.