Just ask Blair Alegant, Philadelphia father of two, Water Department engineer, and avid recycler, who a few weeks ago was faced with disposing of eight pizza boxes from his daughter Natalie's 10th birthday party.

In his Northeast neighborhood, cardboard can be tossed in the recycling bin along with glass, metal and paper.

But what about cardboard stained with pizza grease and the occasional fleck of mozzarella? Alegant wasn't sure, and he didn't know where to call to find out. So, reluctantly, he folded the pizza boxes into the trash.

Other times, after a quick lunch in Center City, Alegant says, he'd love to pitch his drink bottle into a recycling bin - if only he could find one.

"It drives me nuts," he says. "We're the fifth-largest city in the country, and I can't recycle a Snapple bottle after lunch. It should be easier."

It should be, but it's not.

Nationwide, the container-recycling rate is 33 percent, though it's much higher in the 11 states that require a nickel or dime deposit on bottles and aluminum beverage cans. But while curbside recycling programs continue to grow, there are few recycling bins in parks, on corners, or on buses and trains - the places where Americans eat and drink on the go.

Why is the recycling rate so bad? "Because there aren't financial incentives to bring the stuff back," says Jenny Gitlitz, research director for the Container Recycling Institute in Washington, D.C.

People who don't recycle at home cite a lack of storage space, the hassle of rinsing jars and cans, and confusion about recycling-pickup times, says Thomas Kinnaman, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University, who has studied recycling programs nationwide.

Though incentive programs (the carrot approach) make better policy than enforcement and fines (the stick approach, which can prompt illegal dumping), Kinnaman says his research shows the strongest incentive to recycle is the belief that everyone else is doing it.

"When something becomes a social norm, you become an outcast if you're not doing it," he says. "If your neighbors see a lot of bottles in your garbage, you feel the same way as if you let your lawn get too high. It's a taboo."

In 1987, Philadelphia led the environmental charge - it was the first major city to mandate recycling. But the residential recycling rate here has stalled at 6 percent for the last decade.

The city has a patchwork of strategies: Depending on where you live, collection is biweekly or weekly; single-stream (throw it all together) or dual-stream (separate that paper, please); cardboard and some plastics are taken at the curb, or not.

Elsewhere in the region, rules can differ from county to county - even from town to town.

Amid the confusion, the Alegants seem like a beacon of clarity and purpose. In a city of recycling slackers, they overachieve.

"Recycling makes sense," says Alegant, 41. That's why his wife, Kim Ruch-Alegant, gives each of their daughters one water bottle at the start of the week and refills them nightly instead of buying new ones.

It's why the family used to take plastic containers to Blair's mother's house in Langhorne before Philadelphia launched curbside collection of plastics and cardboard for 123,000 Northeast households last summer.

Their children, Natalie and 6-year-old Kassandra, are already disciples. "When me and Kassandra clean up," Natalie says, "if we pick up papers and one of us goes to throw them away, Mommy says, 'You need to recycle that.' "