Coffee grounds to be used in roads

The Australian city of Melbourne is already well-known for its obsession with coffee, but a discovery by a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology could mean that, in the future, the city’s streets are literally paved with the stuff. Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the Melbourne-based University, Arul Aruljah, has found that recycled coffee grounds can be used to create a material strong enough to be used as the layer of road that sits under the surface and provides foundations. While the discovery has a certain poetic irony for anybody who has witness Melburnians’ obsession with coffee first-hand, it is unlikely that it will transform the city’s streets in a hurry. Aruljah and his team estimate that the coffee grounds from all of Melbourne’s cafés would be enough to build just five kilometres of road per year.