Why can the ‘road hot melt white line’ shine for three years, saying goodbye to ‘annual repair’?

Entering the TOP ROAD transportation facility maintenance base, a fully automatic hot melt marking paint production line with a total length of about 30 meters is operating at full capacity. With the roar of machinery, bags of uniformly colored paint are neatly stacked. A few hours later, this batch of high gloss reflective hot melt marking coatings independently developed by TOP ROAD’s transportation resources group industrial company will rush to the construction site of the Chongzun section of the Lanhai Expressway road performance improvement project, outlining a clear “network” for the winding highway along the mountain.

Previously, it was’ drawing lines every year and repairing every year ‘, but now it is’ repairing every three years and keeping it as beautiful as before’. Standing next to the production line, the project leader of the company’s innovation division, Lena, pointed to the newly released product introduction and said that the service life of traditional coatings is usually only one year, while this new national standard maintenance coating has been extended to more than three years, and the entire life cycle can be reduced by about 60%.

Zhejiang has a complex terrain and frequent occurrences of rain, fog, and freezing. In addition, the traditional hot-melt marking paint has insufficient durability and visibility in nighttime and rainy environments due to years of heavy truck compaction on highways. Therefore, the maintenance of domestic highways has long been in a situation of “annual marking and repair”.

The pain point is the direction of tackling the problem. In early 2024, the industrial company formed a professional R&D team led by PhDs to launch a charge towards the technological high ground of marking materials. The R&D team benchmarked the new national standard, screened dozens of raw materials, and repeatedly adjusted the coating mix ratio. During that time, we were calculating ratios and looking at data every day. Rina remembers that in order to overcome key technologies such as long-term reflection, high compression resistance, and high weather resistance, the team experienced countless failures and accumulated half a person’s worth of experimental records. In the end, by selecting high refractive index and high roundness glass beads, continuously optimizing the resin system and product formula, they successfully developed a new series of national standard hot melt marking coatings with good reflective performance and strong construction adaptability.

In order to turn laboratory formulas into tangible products, the first 10000 ton fully automatic hot melt marking line coating intelligent production line in the southeast region was completed here in May 2025. From feeding to finished products, the entire process is automated and controlled, with an annual production capacity of over 20000 tons and an annual output value of 60 million yuan. In the year of production, the production and sales exceeded 2000 tons. Watching the first bag of paint go offline, Rina couldn’t hide her excitement: “This is not only a production line, but also the confidence of Zhejiang’s independent innovation in transportation

At the Huizhen section of the Huixing Expressway, the night lights cut through the sky, and the road markings are still clearly visible from a hundred meters away, like two bright “light bands”. Behind this lies a carefully calculated ‘economic account’.

Many people only focus on the construction unit price, but in fact, the full lifecycle cost is the key, “Rina calculated a detailed account: the construction unit price of traditional old national standard materials may seem low, but the service life is only one year, and the cumulative cost over five years reaches 250 yuan/square meter; Although the initial investment in new materials is considerable, they only need to be restructured once every 3 years, and the cumulative cost over 5 years is only 100 yuan/square meter, resulting in a 60% reduction in overall cost.

At present, this series of products has been widely used in domestic core road networks such as the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macau Expressway and the Beijing Shanghai Expressway, with a cumulative application area of 200000 square meters and an average annual cost reduction of over 6 million yuan.

It is this product that has brought ‘Made in Zhejiang’ to the world stage. On June 30th of this year, a cargo ship safely docked at the port of Singapore. The container opened and 26 tons of high gloss reflective hot melt marking paint from Zhejiang made its debut in a foreign land. This is the first time that an industrial company has independently developed maintenance coatings and gone global, and it is also an important step for “Made in Zhejiang” to participate in international competition.

Singapore experiences high temperatures and frequent rainfall throughout the year, with long and humid road surfaces. Driving conditions on rainy nights have raised higher requirements for the continuous reflection, skid resistance, and durability of hot-melt markings. “At that time, we almost lived in the laboratory and conducted hundreds of adaptability tests,” said team member Make. Hard work pays off. In January 2026, the improved product will be sent for inspection, and all indicators will pass the local performance verification in one go. From Changxing County in Zhejiang Province to ports in Southeast Asia, crossing mountains and seas, the unwavering commitment to quality remains unchanged.

The head of the maintenance engineering department of the industrial company, Make, stated that in the future, he will continue to increase research and development investment, enrich product lines, deeply tap into the domestic market, expand domestic territory, break through overseas space, and promote the “Zhejiang Expressway” transportation maintenance material brand to a broader world stage.

Our company is a professional manufacturer of road hot-melt coatings, road retroreflective measuring instruments, and road marking machines. If you are interested, please feel free to communicate with me via email at any time export@toproadtraffic.com