The company, MacRebur, has its origin story detailed on its website:“The idea was born when our CEO, Toby McCartney, was working in Southern India with a charity helping people who work on landfill sites as ‘pickers.’ Their job is to gather potentially reusable items and sell them to be turned from rubbish into something useful again.

Some of the waste plastics retrieved by the pickers were put into potholes, diesel poured all over them, and the rubbish set alight until the plastics melted into the craters to form a makeshift plastic pothole filler.”