A video i found on you tube last year showed that there are metals to be recycled out of road dust from exhaust and catalytic emissions. The guy doing it swept up a couple of 10kg buckets (like our trusty bunnings pail).
processed it with chemicals in his lab and ended up extracting a ball of platinum ( i think) and a few others. It was small, but on a scale up, made his "paydirt" richer than the natural deposits when mined.
I assume the costs of a plant to process this is high when scaled up.
Processing everything at our waste facility's would have a higher yield if we did it properly. There is no reason, copper, aluminium and steel and other common metals should just end up in the ground. A decent automated waste centre like some in Europe where the waste is on a conveyer, ground up, separated by a few processes, then the final waste product is burnt for fuel to run the plant. Not cheap to set up, but with the amount of stuff we throw out it would make a huge dent in land fill and recycling. we already ship rubbish between local government areas, Coffs pays for theirs to go to Tamworth etc. in the right places they would work.