The USA doesn't differ in material ways in how it produces meat. They raise lots of animals and then kill them in various nasty yet efficient ways, which is no different to how European farms raise meat, not much different to how farms have ever raised meat. There has never been a time when animal farming was ethical and clean. The small differences that do exist in this area are hyped hugely (e.g. chlorine-washed chicken), but when you go looking for concrete harm to people from those practices you can't find them.
The biggest way Americans are harmed by their meat is the fact that it's so cheap that they eat a lot of it, but "we need meat to be expensive so you don't pig out" is not a justification the EU is willing to deploy. At any rate, it's a messy unpleasant business no matter how they're sliced up, and I'll feel a lot better when I'm reading hand-wringing articles about how plant-based meats are destroying the traditional landscape by getting rid of all the cows. It feels like we're on the verge of a breakthrough there: Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat are both very, very convincing. And both firms are American, of course.
BTW recycling rates are a bit of a sham. Most of the material marked as 'recycled' ends up in China and whether it really gets recycled in the way people mean then is very questionable. A lot of it doesn't.
"we should be modelling ourselves on northern Europe rather than Singapore"
I disagree. The UK absolutely should look to America and Singapore. Europe looks increasingly like a reactionary backwater. Look at the mess over vaccines. That dysfunction is everywhere but was hard to spot before because there wasn't a good counter-example to compare to, except very small places like Switzerland which at any rate are forced to be half-in even when they vote against it.
Where's the exciting stuff happening? Where's the progress coming from? I've spent virtually all of my career working for and with Americans, even though I'm a Brit living in central Europe, because that's where the action is. It wasn't even a conscious choice: they came to me, they found me and where were the European companies doing that kind of search? Nowhere. And it showed: the times when my colleagues were mostly European were times when we all reported to bosses in the USA. The EU makes a huge deal all the time about how only it can push back against global forces and defend European "ways of life", which is a purely reactionary take on things and anyway, there is no such "European way of life". The reason they are terrified of being fragmented is because they know they don't have it in them to define the future, only club together to try and stare it down and hope the people who actually are making the future roll over in exasperation. It's a dead end strategy and no path for the next generation.