Two hours a day isn't enough hum of activity at the recycling center at the Rapid City Landfill.

Last week's story about the city's recycling program gave us hope that city residents would have more information to make a decision to participate in the recycling program and, at the same time, left us disappointed so few do now.

Putting aside the obvious benefits for the environment, recycling makes good economic sense for the individual and the city as a whole. We need to do more.

A robust recycling program can drive down landfill operations costs and extend the life of our current landfill years more into the future.

Recycling makes sense for our community and our pocketbooks.

And yet, collectively we only take advantage of a portion of what recycling can offer. For instance, in the last calendar year, Rapid City exported 3,810 tons of recyclable materials and brought in $335,000. While that sounds impressive, it's only about 30 percent of the recyclable materials that we go through over the course of the year.

"If we could get people to start doing it, start recycling, it would make a world of difference," said Rapid City's solid waste manager Jerry Wright.

The biggest difference to bank on is the extended life of the city landfill. While dumping garbage - recyclables included - straight in to the ground is less expensive than recycling them, it takes up space. So much space that it would dramatically reduce the useful life of the landfill.

Thanks to aggressive management and effective recycling programs, today's landfill should last another 40 years of so. We'd like to see that remain constant, or in the best of worlds, be pushed even further out. Because finding land, permits and millions of city taxpayer dollars for a landfill won't come without a battle and high costs.

Recycling is simply an investment in the future. What effort is put in now comes back to the community and taxpayers tenfold.

The real savings will come in the form of taxes that don't increase because the Rapid City Material Recovery Facility is operating at full efficiency and the city landfill enjoys a long life.

Those savings are worth the time now spent separating a few recyclables and placing them on the curb once a week.