Out of Necessity Comes Recycling

Recycling to me is the process of taking all of the terrible packaging off of food products and giving it to a company that probably uses many chemicals and energy to make that packaging into more pristine
packaging that I will then throw away again.  In Africa, everything is recycled from the cardboard boxes that are patched multiple times in grocery stores carrying produce to the clothes that are patched, buffed, and resold time and again until the tatters are made into carrying sacks. The nature of the freshness of food uses far less packaging, and even bottles are not plastic so that all bottles can be returned to bottling plants and reused in their glass form. Electricity is even conserved by having switched on every power outlet so that energy isn't wasted when electronics are plugged but not on.
  Now, of course, the trash that is created is either left at the side of the road or burned, but there is so much more reuse in the country that our wealthy country has completely abandoned that it is humbling,
even if the recycling is born of a dire necessity.