One of the major problems in dealing with trash is intelligent sorting so that valuable and useful material can be sorted and recycled. A subset of this is the problems with plastics which come in a wide variety of chemistries and a basic difference of two types, those that soften and melt with heat and those that do not.
If the unsorted plastics and a few other general trash materials could be sorted out from other useful materials and chopped up indiscriminately into small chunks it should be possible to combine the mass with gravel and form it into a continuous sheet with the heat sensitive plastic acting as a binder. This sheet, the width of a road, might be useful as an underlayer in roadmaking to waterproof the foundation before a layer of concrete is put down. If nothing else, it would draw off many of the billions of discarded plastic bags now plaguing the environment.
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So what you're saying is the concrete isn't waterproof ? ?
While recognizing that recycling of plastics is a good thing I also recognize that roads get replaced about every 30 to 40 years on average. Any material "recycled" into the road will eventually end up in some sort of landfilling operation.
Concrete is recycled to a certain extent. But when the rocks get fractured too many times it doesn't produce as strong of product.
Plastic has been incorporated into concrete in tests. (As well as styrofoam, fiberglass, straw, asphalt, and nearly any other filler material you can imagine.
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What you want under a road is not an impervious layer of plastic.
What you want is something that allows water to seep away without allowing the base course material to go with it or come up through the cracks.
If you had a plastic layer under the road surface the first crack would allow water to begin delaminating the surface. When the first freeze came the surface would heave away from the plastic and in no time at all you have potholes.
What is needed, of course, is a waterproof surface that mates solidly with the concrete. This might be achieved mechanically with microscopic mechanical structures like velcro hooks or loops or chemically with some way of molecularly infusing the two substances. Macadam was invented to displace the unwieldy and expensive but supremely strong structures of the ancient Roman roads which were impervious to water destruction and a thin layer of plastic could displace the traditional tar and use up the thermoplastic in discarded bags.