No need to go excavating the landfills. Americans currently recycle only 5 percent of all plastic that enters the use stream. We just need to do a better job of catching it before it gets to the dump.
Plastics recycling is just barely economically worthwhile as it is. Until very recently, it was cheaper to make products from virgin resin than from recycled resin. So if you add in the cost of recovering plastics from landfills, identifying the kind of plastic, and cleaning them up enough for recycling, manufacturers would pay far more to use “dump” plastic than virgin plastic. Tough sale.