A road can hide a surprisingly large amount of waste beneath its surface. In Geelong, Victoria, material that might once have been treated as rubbish—including used engine oil, discarded glass bottles, old asphalt and truck tires—has been redirected into routine infrastructure work, giving the city a practical way to connect waste reduction with road maintenance.
One of the more unusual examples involved 6,790 litres of recycled engine oil used by City of Greater Geelong works crews in the year leading up to September 2023. Rather than becoming a disposal problem, the oil was applied as an aggregate precoat during road resurfacing, helping bitumen bond more effectively with crushed stone and form a durable road seal.
