Recycling is gradually taking root in Utah, but it's not easy going. American Fork recently weighed the idea of mandatory recycling to get enough people to sign up for the service. A few years ago, Orem almost lost its recycling program because it had so few participants.

While our own informal, unscientific survey found that people would recycle if they didn't have to pay, that does not seem like an option Utah County cities will embrace right away.

The benefits of recycling have been established: It reduces the amount of garbage thrown out, resulting in reduced disposal expense and extended landfill life. It is also a means of coping with growth. This page has even invoked Brigham Young's rag missions in which missionaries gathered scraps of cloth to make paper to print church publications.

But there are still too many places where recycling isn't even offered. And where it is, most do not participate.

Obviously, high-road appeals just don't work effectively. So, let's lower the bar a bit and appeal to civic pride and competition. Brigham Young University, already a leader in recycling, is demonstrating how to do this. The university is engaged in a recycling competition with other schools to see which one can recycle the most material. Last year, BYU placed 10th in the nation.

On campus, BYU's residence halls compete with each other to see which one can recycle the most garbage.

Michael Smart, BYU spokesman, said there is no cash prize, just the sense of pride that the school is doing well -- some bragging rights. Smart said the competition also makes students at the schools more aware of recycling.

Why not adapt that model to cities. Get a competition going to see which city can do the most recycling. The city that wins gets to proclaim itself the greenest in the valley. It could use that title in promotional literature the same way Provo and Orem used their first-place ranking on Money Magazine's most-livable cities list in the 1990s.

We know there' a lot of community pride out there. Just look at how people practically go crazy over high school sports around here, viewing their school's wins and losses as a reflection on the community as a whole. Even though we have a county fair, each city insists on having its own unique summer festival where it can strut its stuff.

We think that such energy could be harnessed to get people engaged in recycling, especially if they view their city as competing with rivals for a right to brag, and possibly attract businesses that look for environmentally-conscious communities.

Any reasonable standard could be agreed upon between the cities -- proportion of households participating, volume or weight of materials diverted from the waste stream, lowest waste per capita, etc.

If it's fun, such a program might get results. Games are always better than preaching.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A4.