Food for thought...Recycling

So I noticed recently as I walked out of the grocery store there was a sign on the bag recycling bin that said it takes 20 thousand plastic bags to make one park bench and they had made and donated 1300 benches! This is only the bags that get brought in and donated! I save mine every time I go to the store and use them for the small trash in the bathrooms and sometimes for other things, but ultimately end up taking a majority of them back to the grocery store recycle bin to put towards another park bench. Seeing this though made me wonder how many park benches we really need. After all, there may come a time when we have all them benches we need and plastic can only be melted down and recycled so many times before it meets it's end. The numbers on the recycling symbol indicate how hard it is to recycle with 1 and 2 being the easiest and the higher numbers being the hardest. Why not recycle the hardest plastics into something that can be reused everyday like children's playsets and save the easy ones for reuse in our everyday lives since I see no trend of plastic use going down? Part of it is the government. I have lived in a few different areas that require different things of it's citizens in terms of recycling. But, overall I have noticed a general trend to just dump everything in the trash and ship it off to the smelly landfills! Decomposition does not happen well in landfills! It would be better if we just took the time to send our empty cans, plastic stuff, glass, paper, and wood to be recycled and then put all of the food waste towards compost for better gardens. How much better would our earth be if we just did these simple things?