Situation Report
We live in a competitive world of capped resource, in which there is a static limit on the maximum amount of life-sustaining energy that is available at a moment in time, and survival means the ability to get sufficient energy to live another day. In this day-to-day battle consumes each compeitor with fear of death, and the fearful propel themselves to improve on their abilities in an attempt to acquire more energy and avoid death. With fear as a driving motivation for change, the winners are rewarded with the energy they require and subsequent survival, while the losers face a lack of energy and ultimate demise.
Fear has been a wonderful motivating factor for humans, and we have reached a level of resource dominance that is no longer in constant jeopardy, freeing ourselfs from the primal fear that plagued our ancestors' existence. Although other inhabitants of the Earth still exist, humans have controlled a virtual resource monopoly; there are no worries about gorillas stealing energy from the starving people of the world. Humans have used this margin of energy safety to continue their development, and squat villages powered by fire converted intp the high-energy analog of high-rise cities radiating in the night.
All of the innovations humans made to form present day society were not able to change the intrinsic law of resource limits, and with each development toward a higher energy society, the cap was gradually uncovered through reports of dwindling fisheries, clear-cut forests, and rising costs for land, oil, and other resources, sparking primal fear upon the realization that if we were to continue the development of a high-energy society, we would not be able to sustain our lifestyles of comfort for very long before they drained all of the available energy on the globe, resulting in death. The spark of fear started the fire in the search for a solution that would deal with the static physical constraint of the Earth and the dynamic energy requirements of humans, and the search unveiled a method to modulate the resource consumption rate of humans by tackling inefficiency, a trait that has been part of humans since the times of Homo erectus and its relatively hairless body that did not insulate body heat as well as that of a bear.
We take resources and input energy to form goods, and once the goods are used up, they are thrown away to potentially return back to the energy well, a process that results in a net loss of energy lost due to the missing chunk of material plus the energy needed to craft it into a good. In order to reduce the energy loss, the divot of Earth that was taken away could be processed once more after its service as a good expired, preventing the need for additional chunks of Earth to be removed through the input of energy to the same object. The process was given a name: Recycling.