In 2023, Australia paved two suburban roads with 135,000 recycled coffee cups and the equivalent of 1.2 million 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.