With a thump on the doorstep, Clint Hopkins' newspaper arrived at his condominium early Nov. 6.

After reading the paper from front to back, Hopkins tossed it into a wooden crate next to his desk. Ten days later, when the crate was full, he dumped its contents into a Roanoke County recycling bin.

From there, county workers hauled the Nov. 6 edition of The Roanoke Times -- along with a mass of other old newspapers, empty aluminum cans and discarded plastic -- to Cycle Systems in Roanoke.

Eventually, Hopkins' newspaper will be shipped to a recycling plant in Dublin, Ga. There, it will be doused in warm water and chemicals to remove the ink. The resulting mush will then be bleached, squeezed, dried and pressed into a new form of newsprint that, one day, will wind up on another reader's doorstep.

It's a process that is happening more often in the Roanoke and New River valleys, according to a statewide recycling report last week by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

The Roanoke region had a recycling rate of 42 percent in 2009. That's a 9 percent increase from 2008, the biggest improvement among the eight urban regions tracked by the DEQ.

Statewide, the recycling rate was 38.6 percent last year.

Although that number has been holding steady, Virginia hit a milestone last year: For the first time since 1989, when the General Assembly imposed recycling mandates for localities, every jurisdiction in the state met its minimum goal.

"The fact that it's taken as long as it has for everyone to meet the mandate is not necessarily a good thing," said Steve Coe, who runs the DEQ's recycling program. Incremental progress over the years shows that "more and more people are looking to do the right thing," Coe said.

For people like Hopkins, who live in places without curbside collection of recyclables, doing the right thing entails a bit more work. But it's worth the effort, Hopkins said Tuesday after driving his pickup truck to a recycling bin in the parking lot of Cave Spring Middle School.

"It keeps the landfill from getting too deep," he said after emptying his crate of newspapers into the bin.

Since 1989, Virginia has required the 71 waste disposal facilities that serve all of its cities, towns and counties to meet recycling mandates -- a rate of at least 25 percent for urban areas, 15 percent for those with less population or high unemployment.

There's a potential fine of $32,500 a day for shirkers, but the DEQ has yet to impose a penalty, opting instead to work with localities to improve.

In 2008, Botetourt and Caroline counties were the only two localities to fall short. Both pushed their recycling rates above the required 15 percent last year.

"We're real pleased with where we are, but we're going to continue to try to improve and get the numbers higher," said Ron Smith, director of public works in Botetourt County.

Two years ago, Smith met with DEQ officials to hash out a plan that included more recycling in the schools and enhanced input from businesses. With four times as many businesses reporting recycling numbers -- counted by the DEQ even if the material is not collected by the county -- Botetourt's rate went from 13 percent to 19 percent.

An even bigger gain was seen at the New River Resource Authority, which handles trash collection and recycling for the city of Radford, and Pulaski and Giles counties. There, the recycling rate jumped from 20 percent to 31 percent over the past two years.

But that number is deceptive. The main reason for the rate increase was a 25 percent drop in waste dumped in the landfill, said Joe Levine, executive director of the authority.

The DEQ calculates the recycling rates by dividing tons of recycled material by total tons of material recycled and sent to the landfill.

"It's not an exact science," Levine said of determining how much a locality recycles.

About 9 million tons of waste was sent to the landfill or burned by Virginia municipalities in 2009, down by nearly 500,000 tons from the year before, according to the DEQ report. The amount of recycled material was also down slightly. The department attributed both declines to the stagnant economy.

Statewide, the highest recycling rates are in urban areas, more likely to offer curbside collection. Falls Church had the top rate last year at 58 percent.

Blacksburg, Roanoke and Vinton are the only localities to offer curbside pickup in the Roanoke region, defined in the DEQ report as a five-county area that includes the Roanoke and New River valleys. (In Christiansburg and Franklin County, newly formed recycling businesses offer pickup for paying customers.)

In Roanoke, about 38 percent of the households actually use the green recycling bins issued by the city.

"We can do a lot better," said Skip Decker, Roanoke's solid waste manager. "But people don't realize the value of recycling, and it's an unfortunate thing."

The city is working to promote recycling in the schools and through community groups such as the Clean Valley Council and the Citizens for Clean and Green Committee.

Within the next three years, the city will make it even easier for residents to recycle by allowing them to put all of their recyclables in a single bin once a week, to be picked up at the same time as their trash. Under the current program, paper is collected one week; plastic, glass and aluminum are collected the next.

In Roanoke County, officials said it's not cost-effective to have trash trucks pick up recyclables when they have to traverse 250 square miles. In fact, the county tried curbside recycling for a decade before quitting in 1997.

That program, the first of its kind by a county in Virginia, started small in more urban areas and was to have expanded gradually. But after federal grant money dried up, the county resorted to a system in which residents can drop recyclables at six collection points.

The containers are filling up faster this year as more residents bring in their mixed paper, aluminum and plastic, said Nancy Duval, solid waste manager for Roanoke County.

Most of Duval's counterparts in surrounding jurisdictions had similar reports. It's a trend they hope to recycle.