Tire rubber recycling for civil engineering applications and products is developing faster, achieving increasingly higher levels of maturation. The improvements in the material circle, where crumb rubber, generated as a by-product of the tire rubber making process, becomes the resource used for the construction of road asphalt pavement, is absolutely necessary for increasing the sustainability of the entire supply chain. The paper reports the results of an accurate data analysis derived from an extensive literature review of existing processes, technologies, and materials within construction of infrastructure. The current position, the direction, and rate of progress of the scientific efforts towards the reuse and recycling of tire rubber worldwide have been shown. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of a set of important properties of Crumb Rubber Modified Asphalt has been carried out—fabrication parameters, standard properties, high and low-temperature performance, and rheological properties. Statistics over a sample of selected publications have been presented to understand the main processes adopted, rubber particle size, temperatures, and possible further modifications of crumb rubber modified binder.

Recently, the reduction of the environmental burdens related to highway infrastructures has been in the spotlight. Within this context, the use of recycled materials in bituminous mixtures for road pavement construction and maintenance has the potential to mitigate the excessive use of non-renewable resources. Nevertheless, the material consumption is only one of the aspects that affects the sustainability of an infrastructure. Other relevant aspects related to environmental issues should be considered. The objective of this work is to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of asphalt mixtures containing crumb rubber (CR) (vulcanised or devulcanised) and reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) assuming different Degree of binder Activation (DoA) of the aged binder by means of a life cycle assessment (LCA). The results show that the small amount of CR used for bituminous mixtures application does not justify all the additional consumption of resources and emissions associated with its treatment. These results are explained by the higher environmental impacts stemming from the treatment of the rubber and the higher amount of bitumen employed in the mixture. In turn, for mixtures containing RAP the analysis revealed an improvement in the score of all the environmental indicators considered.