Urgent need for plastic recycling plants in the UK

In view of the appalling revelations that the UK has been shipping vast quantities of plastic, especially PET, to China for many years, would it not be a good idea to have the UK lead once more in something and have genuine recycling plants set up here in the country?

I mean genuine plants to process the plastic from not just the UK but the whole of Europe, not only depots for onward reselling as seems to have been the case.

There are initiatives to use such waste plastic in innovative ways. For example there is a small start-up company in Scotland which is developing ways to reduce the amount of toxic bitumen in asphalt by substituting a proportion of waste plastic into the mix.

Surely we should urge government and private industry to build and develop plants to deal with the problem now, before we are knee deep in PET bottles.