Recycling of waste tire rubber in asphalt and portland cement concrete: An overview

Waste tires pose significant health and environmental concerns if not recycled and/or discarded properly. Over the years, recycling waste tires into civil engineering applications, especially into asphalt paving mixtures and portland cement concrete, has been gaining more and more interests. This review summarizes the recent advances in the use of waste tire rubber in asphalt and portland cement concrete. The use of crumb rubber in asphalt paving mixture has long been proven successful due to good compatibility and interaction between rubber particles and asphalt binder, leading to various improved properties and performance of asphalt mixtures. The rubberized asphalt mixtures also have shown good compatibility with two widely used sustainability technologies in asphalt paving industry - reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) and warm-mix asphalt (WMA). In comparison with its use in asphalt paving mixtures, recycling of waste rubber in Portland cement concrete has not been so successful due to two factors: (1) incompatibility in chemical property between rubber and cement paste and (2) the significant difference in stiffness resulting in stress concentrations. Various methods have been proposed to overcome the barriers to improve the performance of rubberized portland cement concrete, some of which have shown to be promising.