When I worked in a charity many moons ago the motto was always: reduce, reuse and recycle. The 3 R's as it was called was arranged in order of importance. It is underlying principle that people should follow but you can kinda guess why recycling is most heavily promoted as the other two Rs are not conductive to our consumer lifestyle. If you are serous about reducing your impact then most of your efforts have to be directed towards the first two Rs.

I would also add that many items commonly labelled as recyclable are a bust so you can't even rely on the stuff being recycled and quite often, it just ends up being dumped in some landfill. And that is only considering the stuff with the recycle label with items not even labelled as such I would expect the recycle rates to be much lower.

In fact a big concern I have with EV's is what will happen to all those discarded batteries? I have a hard time believing it will be reused or recycled in large quantities. Solar panels and wind turbines might fair marginally better to recycling but I would put stress on the word marginal.