Forget horses and water. How about, “You can give containers to residents, but you can’t make them recycle.”

Compared to other Maine cities, Lewiston and Auburn’s recycling lags. At 27 percent and 23 percent respectively, our recycling rates lag behind those in Biddeford, Waterville, South Portland, Brewer, Brunswick and other service center communities.

Of course, no two cities recycle equally. Some towns spur recycling through per-bag fees on disposal, others through mandatory ordinances, education or plain, old, reliable curbside pick-up. The state of Maine urges recycling but doesn’t dictate how it should occur.

Although the legislative attention on energy efficiency, environmental preservation and regionalizing of services, it remains strange that state government maintains this hands-off approach to recycling. We bet it won’t last.

Regardless, recycling must increase in L-A. The recycling rates do mask a troubling reality: only about 10 percent of overall waste collected in Lewiston and Auburn is recycled, a woeful percentage for the size of this community.

Yet there’s no ready-made road for improvement.

Education campaigns, especially in schools, do prepare recyclers – but those of tomorrow. The preponderance of apartment-dwellers in L-A is a base constituency of residents without a vested interest in recycling. And buck-a-bag is viewed with loathing.

This has led to discussions about single-stream recycling, a service provided by two companies: EcoMaine, in Portland, and FCR, a subsidiary of Casella Waste Systems.

According to projections by an Auburn recycling committee, however, adopting an applaudable single-stream system wouldn’t cut costs, though it would boost recycling by making it drag-to-the-curbside-in-one-bin simple.

This should be a concern in Auburn, which spends, the committee found, $104.84 to recycle one ton of materials. Disposal of one ton of solid waste, by comparison, costs a cheap-sounding $65.15. Auburn, like many of Maine’s larger cities and towns, needs an economy of scale to equalize this expense.

Because these figures are a strong recycling disincentive. This is why policies like buck-a-bag, although unpopular, are effective. It provides a clear financial motivation for recycling.

If a leader in Lewiston-Auburn has the gut gravel to propose a bag fee, we would support it because they work.

Then there’s another solution for balancing the economy of scale – a regional single-stream effort.

Lewiston and Auburn now recycle together, but the woeful collective result makes a regional single-stream recycling system among the towns in the Androscoggin County Valley of Governments an attractive and pragmatic solution.

AVCOG held a meeting recently, trying to drum up support for a regional single-stream recycling program. We urge it to keep pushing the issue, because increasing recycling and making it cost-efficient are mutually exclusive, if done town-by-town or city-by-city.

A regional approach is right.