One of the Journal readers owes me a heaping helping of "I told you so."

In late January, I received newly released recycling-rate statistics from the Spokane Regional Solid Waste System. What the numbers showed was groundbreaking: In 2010, for the first time, Spokane County residents recycled more than they threw away.

Specifically, it showed a 51 percent recycling rate, up a full nine percentage points from 2009. I looked for inconsistencies in the data, finding none. I asked Suzanne Tresko, recycling coordinator for the city of Spokane, about it. She likened the recycled trend to a diet. With a diet, she said, you eat less and exercise more until one day, you notice a big difference. Likewise, recycling advocates finally saw their efforts pay off in the 2010 data.

Fascinating news indeed—we put it on the front page of the Journal.

The next week, a reader called. Those numbers can't be right, she said. I told her I went over them. She said I must have missed something—there was no way the numbers could have changed that dramatically in one year. She didn't say it this way, but her message was this: We didn't just wake up as a community in 2010 to the benefits of recycling and start crushing all cans and breaking down all corrugated-cardboard boxes.

I assured her those were the accurate numbers. But as she suspected, there was a wrinkle.

I pulled the numbers again recently while gathering data for the Journal's Market Fact Book, which we'll publish in late May. This time, the report had a new line item—one that wasn't there when the numbers were first released—showing that 16 percent of the total, or about 45,000 tons, is what's called an all-state tonnage adjustment.

Gretchen Newman, an Olympia-based environmental specialist with the Washington state Department of Ecology who helps compile data for the county reports, says some companies and agencies who report recycling data to the state don't designate the county in which the goods were gathered. An all-state tonnage adjustment allows a county to estimate its share of that total.

According to Newman, however, there isn't a standard procedure for calculating the adjustment. She says Ecology provides the raw data, and it's up to the local governments to interpret it.

Tresko disputes that, saying the 16 percent figure came from Ecology. She adds that the 2009 numbers included an all-state tonnage adjustment as well, though there is no line item in that year's report showing it.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. There's logic behind the tonnage adjustment. However, the fact that it's a soft number, coupled with the fact that it contributed to a huge leap in recycling volume in one year, makes it highly unlikely that Spokane residents recycled more than they threw away.

If the adjustment is taken out of the 2010 report, the recycling rate is 47 percent, which still would be five percentage points higher than the prior year. Considering the recycling rate historically has been in the low 40 percent range, that still is an encouraging figure for recycling advocates.

With Waste Management Inc.'s single-stream recycling plant coming on line later this year, it will be easier for Spokane-area residents to recycle, and the company says it expects a greater percentage of households to do so. Its experience in other markets suggests that's what will happen.

It's entirely possible that soon, we as a community will recycle more than we throw away. But as one of the Journal readers tried to tell me earlier this year, we're probably not there. Not yet.