EV experience so far

Its a feel good thing,like when I get out of my G-4 and hop in my Prius .Feels good 

Only about 5% of plastic is recycled in the US. Yep, 5%. Plastic bottles fare better at around 28%. Paper is much better at around 2/3, as is aluminum and cardboard are great at about 85%-90. Glass, which should be easily reclycable, in only about 1/3.

Pretty pathetic overall
but the plastic is by far the worst offender, and it's rate has been going down because of foreign countrys import bans in recent years.

So why is plastic so bad? Unless it has a 1,2, or 5 in the recycling triangle on it you might as well throw it in the landfill. No one can reprocess anything else, all the other numbers are pretend recycling put there by the manufacturers to make you feel good cause you think they get recycled. For the rest, thereis a ready market because most companies want to be able to take green credits so would buy the recycled material, even though it is more expensive than virgin plastic. But there isn't enough capacity.

So it's a mess, and it's gotten worse not better. Probably we should quit using plastic for most things altogether, even when it is recycled it's energy inefficient and produces toxic gasses. What was so wrong with cardboard milk cartons and paper grocery sacks?

  I was at the grocery store and included in the groceries I purchased were plant based protein foods and while checking out a young girl who was bagging the groceries commented on the plant based proteins. She was educated on the benifits of plant based proteins even eating insects for protein and that let me realized more that a younger generation is becoming more educated of using our natural resources more wisely. As time goes by and a younger generation is more involved in making decisions hopefully things will change for the better. We as americans have made progress in learning from our mistakes and hopefull a younger generation will speed up the progress, we all need to do our part to be good stewards of the planet we live on.

Its cool with me if the conversation ranges off the original topic, it's more interesting that way and this after all the general discussion category. Airplanes don't have anything to do with EVs either...

I agree with the comments re the throw away economy we live in. Especially irritating to me the overuse of plastics which don't get recycled, ending up in the landfills if we're lucky and the oceans more than likely. We're all eating tiny bits of plastic all the time now, that crap is in everything. Who knows what the long term effects of that will be? Why do we now have all this plastic packaging thats incredibly hard to get open and fills up our garbage cans? We never needed it before...

The solution I think is the kind of thing the EU has done with E-waste, which is probably the worst single waste stream because there's so much of it and a lot of it is hazardous. They have the WEEE and RoHS directives, which make it the responsibility of the manufacturers, importers, distributors, and waste handlers to properly recycle their products so they don't just wind up in the landfills or get dumped in 3rd world countries with no standards.

As mjlrpod says these businesses are the ones profiting from the sale of these products, and they are also the ones who control the designs and materials usage and end of life processing, so are the only ones able to build them to last and be reprocessed when they do eventually become unusable.

Of course the corporations which are in the hot seat because of WEEE don't like it, it cuts into their profits. When I was a design engineer for a solar manufacturer and WEEE was first introduced, I was tasked to evaluate what would be required to comply. It would have been a lot of work in redesign but essenially all the materials in our products could be recovered. The actual product cost would only be a little higher. But even a few pennies is too much for the corporate bottom line...

So unfortunately, and sorry if this steps over the line into politics in some folks view, but for this kind of thing to work it cant be loca It has to be done on the federal level, and our elected representatives take so much money from corporate interests that something like WEEE would never get through Congress. It would just be labelled as government overreach and die in committee.

So whether we want to or not we will continue to to buy the cheap throwaway junk and toss it in the landfill when were done with it until something changes in Washington. Don't hold your breath.

Or we can do without the products. That's what I try to do to small extent, and also because I'm cheap. Im typing this on a 15 year old laptop, apologies for my frequent typos, a lot of my keys are sticky....

To try to put all the different ways in which humans are using and overusing the planets resources in perspective there is an interesting methodology called the ecological footprint, which evaluates human resource use in terms of biocapacity of the cropland, forest land, grazing land, urbanized space, fisheries, fresh water, ability to absorb the CO2, etc of the ppl that live there. This is put in terms of surface area so can be used to compare countries as well as the whole planet.

The last thing I read it looked like humans were now using something like 1.8 earths overall, meaning that we are living on reserve capacity, borrowing from our children and grandchildren by about a factor of two. I'm sure that's not much of a surprise to anyone.

Japan being as crowded as it is needs about 8 Japans, which it supplies by imports. We need about 2.4 Americas. China is about the same as the US, more crowded but less per capita consumption, so far. Europe would need about 2 Europes.

But here's the more scary thing: if everyone was as affluent as Americans, we would need 5 planets! And you better believe most countries would like to have what the highly developed countries have. Who's going to stop them? Resource wars are nothing new, we already fight wars over oil, and the Nazis invaded Poland and Russia for lebensraum.

So unless youre an Elon Musk fanboy and think Mars is gonna solve our problems, we need to get our act together or our descendants will not look upon us very fondly 100 years from now.

  The thing I thought of most was junk furniture or as I call it disposible furniture. Sorry this doesn't have much to do with offgrids EV experience but being a woodworker I couldn't help but to mentioned all the cheap disposible furniture.