Dan Schmidt, a policy director for Gov. Mike Pence, said it best.

“There must be a better way,” the governor’s adviser told a group of state lawmakers gathered to talk about the state’s chronically low recycling rate.

The abysmal rate of recycling is on display every week in Indianapolis neighborhoods that are filled with trash cans but few curbside recycling bins. It’s on display when you walk Downtown and peer into a garbage can filled with bottles and other recyclables. And it was on display this week when a group of manufacturers talked of the need for more recycled materials, which are cheaper than new materials and, they note, create jobs.

Schmidt talked about the 8.6 million tons of trash collected at Indiana landfills and incinerators each year and the huge value of raw materials that in too many cases are just buried. He talked about not wanting to toss broken lamps and toys into the trash because he knows fixing them will lead to less waste and because we need to be “looking at this stuff in a different way.”

For all of my complaints about the state legislature this year, Monday’s hearing was encouraging. Jointly chaired by Senate Environmental Affairs Chairman Ed Charbonneau, R-Valparaiso, and his House counterpart David Wolkins, R-Warsaw, the meeting signaled perhaps a shift in thinking at the Statehouse. Wolkins, pointing to jobs and other economic benefits, said he has moved “from adamantly opposed to just opposed” to recycling mandates and things such as deposit fees on bottles.

Meanwhile, the Statehouse mood has seemed to brighten at least a bit for environmentalists. Carey Hamilton, executive director of the Indiana Recycling Coalition, has been urging lawmakers to end the Mitch Daniels-era freeze on a state program that provides recycling-related grants — both to community efforts and to help businesses that rely on secondhand material such as glass and plastic.

Under Daniels, the grant program, funded by fees charged at landfills, largely died because of state budget tightening. Hamilton and others hope lawmakers will make $3.4 million a year available for grants — money, it should be noted, that is now just sitting in a state account.

No solutions were enacted at Monday’s meeting, and that’s OK. Most important was the fact that everyone was talking — manufacturers and environmentalists, Democrats and Republicans, skeptics and believers. Making things easier is the fact that there is a benefit to recycling for just about everyone at the table, whether your issue is the environment or the needs of business.

This isn’t just about household recycling, although that is important. It is about, as Hamilton said, “changing the system, and that’s like turning the Titanic around.”

“The system we’ve created can treat waste very well as waste,” she said. “What industry wants, and what a lot of folks want, is to handle it as the commodity that it is.”

That means giving residents free bins and merging recycling and trash pickup fees so Indianapolis doesn’t continue to have one of the lowest curbside recycling rates among U.S. cities. It means investing in centers that can better sort recyclables. It means educating Hoosiers on the economic and other benefits of doing so. It means making it easier for people to dispose properly of things such as old TVs and microwaves. It might mean pushing, rather than begging, people and companies to recycle.

A new Ball State University study, produced by the Bowen Center for Public Affairs, shows overwhelming support for environmental efforts such as recycling programs. And many in business are on board, as improvements would lead to an increase in cheaper aluminum, plastic, paper and other materials. An Indiana Recycling Coalition report says each ton of recycling content creates 10 jobs in areas such as transportation, processing and manufacturing.

David Bender with Perpetual Recycling Solutions, a Richmond company that converts bottles into other usable content, is among the job creators. He summed up things well.

“We need to change,” he told the lawmakers. “We need to do something. We need to be able to build the infrastructure to make it possible for companies like mine to buy the material they need.”

Nothing formal changed this week. But the conversation was a good start.