The Ministry of Science and Technology’s Central Road Research Institute (CSIR-CRRI), working with Oriental Structural Engineers Private Limited and Ooms Polymer Modified Bitumen Pvt. Ltd., has successfully tested a new approach to road construction on National Highway-716 between Chennai and Tirupati. The demonstration shows that roads can be built using 60 percent recycled asphalt material instead of newly quarried stone and bitumen, marking an important step towards more sustainable highway construction in India.
What was demonstrated
The field trial involved laying a section of road using Dense Bituminous Macadam, a common pavement layer, made with 60 percent Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP). RAP is material recovered from existing roads that contains useful aggregates and aged bitumen. The demonstration included the complete recycling process: recovering RAP from old pavements, testing it, treating it with REJUBIT (an indigenous rejuvenation technology), designing new mixes, producing material at a hot-mix plant, and laying it on the actual highway under controlled conditions.
REJUBIT is a bitumen rejuvenator jointly developed by CSIR-CRRI and Ooms India. Its purpose is to restore the properties of aged bitumen found in reclaimed asphalt, allowing a higher percentage of recycled material to be used in new road construction.
Senior officials from the National Highways Authority of India, the Tamil Nadu government, construction companies and technical experts attended the demonstration to observe the process and understand how recycled road material can be reused at scale.
What this means for you
This technology could reduce the demand for newly extracted stone and imported bitumen in road construction, lowering costs and environmental impact. It also reduces waste by treating old road material as a valuable resource rather than discarding it. If wider adoption follows, highway projects across India may use significantly less virgin material, which could mean cheaper, greener roads while extracting more value from existing road networks.