In 2023, Australia paved two suburban roads with 135,000 recycled coffee cups and glass bottles, cutting the asphalt’s carbon footprint by 24%

What happens to a takeaway coffee cup after the last sip? In most cases, it ends up in landfill because the thin waterproof lining inside the cup makes conventional recycling difficult. In Australia, however, thousands of these discarded cups have found a very different second life: as part of the material used to build roads.In Penrith, New South Wales, two suburban roads were resurfaced using an asphalt mixture containing recycled coffee cups, crushed glass and other recovered materials. The project used about 135,000 discarded coffee cups and the equivalent of 1.2 million glass bottles. According to Closed Loop, the recycled-content asphalt reduced the road surface's carbon footprint by about 24%.The roads, covering nearly 750 metres in total, included about 400 metres of Jamison Road in South Penrith and 350 metres of Swallow Drive in Erskine Park. The project marked an Australian-first effort to incorporate recycled coffee cups into local road construction.The technology behind the project grew out of an earlier collaboration between State Asphalt Services, recycling organisation Closed Loop and the Simply Cups program. The idea was relatively simple: take a waste stream that ...