With 250 square miles of ground to cover, Roanoke County officials say they may never be able to provide curbside recycling to every residence.

But, in partnership with some private businesses, the county is slowly expanding its latest recycling effort by adding collection points at schools and private businesses.

The surge in the program has come with the location of recycling trailers donated by Cycle Systems at each of the county's five middle schools.

It's part of an effort to make the recycling program "as visible and saturated as possible," said Nancy Duval, solid-waste manager for the county.

The new trailers will join a small program that began with the placement of recycling bins at Hollins University in the fall of 2005 and now, besides the schools, includes a public collection site at the Cox Communications offices on Fallowater Lane.

The Cave Spring Middle School collection point, though only in operation since February 2007, is "far and away, by volume, the biggest one," Duval said.

The 106,000 pounds of newspaper picked up so far in Cave Spring, for instance, is four times as much as at Glenvar Middle School.

"The main reason is that the location is very visible from a big thoroughfare, [U.S.] 221, and it gets a lot of use from the schools. Cave Spring Elementary recycles all of its plastic milk bottles used for lunch" through the container, she said.

"The biggest complaint we get is, 'I was at Cave Spring and the trailer was gone.' We have to empty it" two to three times a week, Duval said.

"That's a great problem to have."

That bin, which was bought by the county, will be replaced by one of the Cycle System trailers soon and moved to another location.

Art students at each of the middle schools have been asked to create designs to be painted on the trailers or transferred to vinyl and applied to them. Duval said she wasn't sure how long that process will take.

Cycle Systems is a 92-year-old Roanoke company that began as a scrap metal business and now includes a wide array of recycling services.

Company President Jay Brenner said partnering with the schools provided a natural opportunity "to teach the values of recycling while making recycling convenient for residents where there is no curbside pickup."

Duval pointed out that it might never make economic or environmental sense to send recycling collection trucks to the most distant corners of the county. Besides being costly, "in the long run you have a trade-off" between the good recycling does and the "greenhouse emissions the trucks put out. Where is the line you're crossing when you're doing more harm than good?"

In fact, the county tried curbside recycling for a decade before finally calling it quits in the fall of 1997.

That program, the first of its kind by a county in Virginia, started small in more urban areas and was supposed to have expanded gradually throughout the county.

Instead, the program never reached more than 15 percent of the county's households.

After federal grants to help pay for recycling dried up, the county decided the high cost of the labor-intensive program and low payoff from selling recyclables made it unfeasible.

Roanoke considered canning its curbside recycling program shortly after that, citing low participation and the expense.

The program got a booster in Darlene Burcham, however, when she became Roanoke's city manager in January 2000.

By the fall of that year, the program was reorganized and expanded. Since then, participation has risen from 7 percent to 39 percent of city households.

While the system doesn't pay for itself, the city does avoid paying disposal fees for recyclables when it collects at least 225 tons a month. That happens about half the time, said Bob Bengtson, the city's director of public works.

In addition, a reinvigorated partnership with the city's schools has tripled recycling there, from 10 tons in September 2007 to 30 tons in February. That saved the school system $13,200 in disposal fees over the period.

In a news release announcing the placement of the bins at the Roanoke County middle schools, Cycle Systems said the schools will receive "financial contributions" from the recyclable plastic, glass and paper collected there.

While it's not clear how much those "contributions" will amount to, Duval pointed out that the amount of revenue the county gets from its current collection points -- Hollins University, Glenvar and Cave Spring middle schools, and Oak Grove Elementary -- is modest.

"We get a check every month or couple of months for $30 or $40," she said. And even that is likely to go down because the county intends to expand the paper recycling to material besides newsprint, which will bring profits down.

The benefit, however, is that more materials should be recycled, including office paper and cardboard.

"We've wanted to provide recycling opportunities to county citizens for a long time," Duval said.

"Revenue, I'm not saying that's not important, but it's not the determining factor at all. The biggest thing is finding the way to provide that service most efficiently."