Climate & Environment
Australian Suburb Uses Recycled Coffee Cups and Glass to Build Greener Roads
Millions of discarded coffee cups typically end up in landfill because their thin waterproof lining makes conventional paper recycling difficult. In Penrith, New South Wales, however, thousands of these cups have been given a new purpose: as part of the asphalt used to build local roads.
Two suburban roads in Penrith were resurfaced using an asphalt mixture containing recycled coffee cups, crushed glass and other recovered materials. The project used approximately 135,000 discarded coffee cups and the equivalent of 1.2 million glass bottles. According to recycling organisation Closed Loop, the recycled-content asphalt cut the road surface's carbon footprint by about 24%.
The resurfaced roads covered nearly 750 metres combined, including roughly 400 metres of Jamison Road in South Penrith and 350 metres of Swallow Drive in Erskine Park. The initiative was described as an Australian-first effort to incorporate recycled coffee cups into local road construction.
The technology originated from a partnership between State Asphalt Services, Closed Loop and the Simply Cups collection program. The concept was straightforward: identify a waste stream that is hard to recycle, extract its useful material and find a large-scale application for it.
John Kypreos, director of State Asphalt Services, first explored the idea of using discarded coffee cups in asphalt several years before the Penrith roads were built. His concept eventually connected with Closed Loop's Simply Cups program, leading to an early 50-metre test section laid in western Sydney.
Before being used on public roads, the experimental asphalt underwent rigorous testing, including repeated passes by heavily loaded trucks and laboratory equipment that flexed the material until it failed. Kypreos said the test surface performed at least as well as conventional asphalt and demonstrated strong durability. The exact proportion of coffee-cup material in the mixture remains commercially confidential.
The resulting product, known as PAK-PAVE™, was developed by State Asphalts NSW in collaboration with Closed Loop Environmental Solutions and Simply Cups. The University of New South Wales also contributed to the project through a Commonwealth Cooperative Research Centres Program grant, and the technology received approval from relevant NSW authorities.
Coffee cups are valuable for this purpose because they contain high-quality fibre; their main obstacle to recycling is the plastic or waterproof lining, not the material itself. Through Simply Cups, used cups are collected separately and processed for applications such as road surfacing. Closed Loop founder Rob Pascoe has said that recycling only succeeds when collected waste is turned into a marketable product.
The Penrith road mixture also includes crushed recycled glass, reclaimed asphalt pavement and steel furnace slag. Recycled glass has previously been used in road projects across several Sydney councils. In this case, recovered materials make up more than half of the total road-making materials, reducing reliance on new raw resources.
This approach reflects what environmental groups describe as a circular economy, where materials remain in use rather than being discarded after a single use. For a waste stream to genuinely fit this model, the recovered material must have a practical application, meet required standards, and have a viable market. Pascoe emphasised in a 2020 report by The Guardian that simply collecting waste does not complete the recycling process—the material must be reused for the cycle to be truly closed.
The project also reflects broader efforts in Australia to reduce landfill dependence and strengthen domestic recycling infrastructure. Closed Loop has focused on connecting waste-producing companies with manufacturers capable of transforming that waste into usable products.
The potential benefits extend beyond environmental impact. In 2020, Gayle Sloan, then CEO of the Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association Australia, told The Guardian that recovering or recycling 10,000 tonnes of waste could generate significantly more jobs than sending the same material to landfill or exporting it.
State Asphalt Services has even broader ambitions: producing roads made almost entirely from recycled materials. At its western Sydney plant, recycled glass already substitutes for some sand, and old road surfaces are processed and reincorporated into new asphalt.
The Penrith project illustrates how everyday waste can become an industrial resource when collection systems, technology and market demand align—transforming a discarded coffee cup from the end of a product's life into raw material for something new, quite literally under the wheels of Australian drivers.