Enhancing Sustainable Pavements in India Through Crumb Rubber Modification Asphalt.

  • Unique Paper ID: 209573
  • Volume: 13
  • Issue: 5
  • PageNo: 2523-2529
  • Abstract:
  • Flexible pavements on India’s national highways carry heavy, often overloaded commercial traffic through hot plains, wet coastal belts and cold mountain regions. Under these conditions, wearing courses made with ordinary viscosity-grade bitumen tend to rut, strip in the presence of water and crack, and each round of repair adds to the costs borne by highway agencies and road users. Crumb rubber modified bitumen, produced by blending ground scrap-tyre rubber into bitumen by the wet process, can improve these properties while giving waste tyres a productive use. This paper reviews the Indian Roads Congress guidelines and the Bureau of Indian Standards and Ministry of Road Transport and Highways specifications that govern rubber-modified binders, and compiles reported data on binder rheology and mixture performance relative to conventional viscosity-grade bitumen. Construction and quality-assurance requirements for rubberised binders are examined, and a simplified life-cycle cost comparison for a one-kilometre, two-lane national highway section is used to weigh the higher initial cost against later savings in maintenance and user costs. The reported evidence shows that rubber-modified wearing courses resist rutting better, recover more elastically and are less susceptible to moisture damage, and the cost comparison indicates a life-cycle saving of about 23% over 30 years. These benefits depend on rubber gradation and content, blending conditions, storage stability and compaction control in the field. Gaps remain in long-term field data from Indian roads, low-temperature behaviour at high altitude, recyclability and production emissions, and recommendations are made for specifications and further research.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{209573,
        author = {Madika Mahender and M Sreenivasa Reddy},
        title = {Enhancing Sustainable Pavements in India Through Crumb Rubber Modification Asphalt.},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {5},
        pages = {2523-2529},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=209573},
        abstract = {Flexible pavements on India’s national highways carry heavy, often overloaded commercial traffic through hot plains, wet coastal belts and cold mountain regions. Under these conditions, wearing courses made with ordinary viscosity-grade bitumen tend to rut, strip in the presence of water and crack, and each round of repair adds to the costs borne by highway agencies and road users. Crumb rubber modified bitumen, produced by blending ground scrap-tyre rubber into bitumen by the wet process, can improve these properties while giving waste tyres a productive use. This paper reviews the Indian Roads Congress guidelines and the Bureau of Indian Standards and Ministry of Road Transport and Highways specifications that govern rubber-modified binders, and compiles reported data on binder rheology and mixture performance relative to conventional viscosity-grade bitumen. Construction and quality-assurance requirements for rubberised binders are examined, and a simplified life-cycle cost comparison for a one-kilometre, two-lane national highway section is used to weigh the higher initial cost against later savings in maintenance and user costs. The reported evidence shows that rubber-modified wearing courses resist rutting better, recover more elastically and are less susceptible to moisture damage, and the cost comparison indicates a life-cycle saving of about 23% over 30 years. These benefits depend on rubber gradation and content, blending conditions, storage stability and compaction control in the field. Gaps remain in long-term field data from Indian roads, low-temperature behaviour at high altitude, recyclability and production emissions, and recommendations are made for specifications and further research.},
        keywords = {End-of-life tyres, Life-cycle cost analysis, Moisture susceptibility, Rutting, Storage stability, Wet process},
        month = {October},
        }

Cite This Article

Mahender, M., & Reddy, M. S. (2026). Enhancing Sustainable Pavements in India Through Crumb Rubber Modification Asphalt.. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 13(5), 2523–2529.

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