  There has been a persistent conundrum in attempts to model the
nucleosynthesis of heavy elements by rapid neutron capture (the $r$-process).
Although the location of the abundance peaks near nuclear mass numbers 130 and
195 identify an environment of rapid neutron capture near closed nuclear
shells, the abundances of elements just above and below those peaks are often
underproduced by more than an order of magnitude in model calculations. At the
same time there is a debate in the literature as to what degree the $r$-process
elements are produced in supernovae or the mergers of binary neutron stars. In
this paper we propose a novel solution to both problems. We demonstrate that
the underproduction of elements above and below the $r$-process peaks
characteristic in the main or weak $r$-process events (like magnetohydrodynamic
jets or neutrino-driven winds in core-collapse supernovae) can be supplemented
via fission fragment distributions from the recycling of material in a
neutron-rich environment such as that encountered in neutron star mergers. In
this paradigm, the abundance peaks themselves are well reproduced by a
moderately neutron rich, main $r$-process environment such as that encountered
in the magnetohydrodynamical jets in supernovae supplemented with a
high-entropy, weakly neutron rich environment such as that encountered in the
neutrino-driven-wind model to produce the lighter $r$-process isotopes.
Moreover, we show that the relative contributions to the $r$-process abundances
in both the solar-system and metal-poor stars from the weak, main, and
fission-recycling environments required by this proposal are consistent with
estimates of the relative Galactic event rates of core-collapse supernovae for
the weak and main $r$-process and neutron star mergers for the
fission-recycling $r$-process.
