(Harrisburg) -- A midstate law professor who helped draft Pennsylvania's original recycling statute has some recommendations to improve its impact 20 years later. Under the commonwealth's recycling law, several million tons of materials are recycled every year and greenhouse gas emissions are being reduced. But John Dernbach, a professor at Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg, says he and his students discovered during their research that available data does not provide any conclusions about whether recycling has gone up or down in the last 10 years. He says it's important for the state to take action to spark better behaviors from residents, businesses and municipalities. "A starting point would be establishing goals for per capita waste disposal, establishing a new goal for recycling, so that we would all have something that we could look at that is more ambitious than what we are doing now and something that as Pennsylvanians we could work toward together," he says. Dernbach says thousands of jobs already depend on recycling and with better oversight that figure could increase. He says collecting materials for recycling and then manufacturing them into something else creates more jobs than throwing the materials in a landfill would. The report has been delivered to the governor and the state Department of Environmental Protection for their review.