For Kevin Lowe, product management director for our Traffic Solutions business, there’s a solid line connecting his job to his motivation – helping keep people safe through proper road markings.
Up Close and Personal Experience
Kevin joined us in 2019, bringing extensive material science experience that includes automotive, from his time at Dow Chemical and DowDuPont. Before moving into our Traffic Solutions business in 2022, he, like most people, took for granted the white and yellow lines and other road markings that help us safely get to where we need to be. That’s no longer the case.
I recently was driving on a mountainous road with no guardrails through the thickest fog I’d ever encountered. The only thing that kept me and my passengers safe was the visibility of the lines on the road. Road markings are really unsung safety heroes. This is what motivates me each day, and it’s why I love what I do.
What he does is product strategy development, competitive analysis, product development and product lifecycle management for our thermoplastic products. His customers are city, county, state, provincial and federal transportation departments as well as road-marking, or striping, contractors. Kevin believes the ultimate customer is the taxpayer, which is why he strives to deliver solutions that offer value as well as performance. Our thermoplastic road markings do both.
Solid Road-Marking Performance
More durable than traditional roadway paint, thermoplastic road markings start as a solid before being melted and applied to a road. Once dry, they return to a solid state that typically lasts from four to five years compared to one to two years at most for painted lines. Today, thermoplastics are used for about 30% of pavement markings in the U.S. despite mainly being used where snowplows aren’t, and their popularity is on the rise.
I take pride in that our thermoplastics are made from tree resin supplied by companies that practice sustainable forestry. There’s also some amazing technology behind what appears to be a simple product to make them more durable and retroreflective.
A major advance for not only our company but the road-marking industry was the introduction of our THERMODROP® pelletized thermoplastic offered under our ENNIS-FLINT® by PPG brand. While nearly all other thermoplastic road-marking products are granular, our ThermoDrop thermoplastic product is the only one in pellet form. This can significantly increase the quality, productivity and safety of road-striping projects.
The vast majority of contractors load bags of thermoplastic into a road-marking vehicle, which melts and applies the material before it cools into a hard polymer. Our pelletized thermoplastic melts faster than the granular form, enabling quicker job startups and longer continuous operations. This reduces the time needed for job completion and traffic disruption, and it also helps customers overcome the current labor shortage that’s causing significant backlogs in road-marking projects. The work environment is also cleaner due to reduced dust while dumping the bags.
“I visited a jobsite in El Paso, Texas, during a very hot summer day. One of the workers thanked me so much for our ThermoDrop product. He said it changes the whole working environment, because he no longer has dust all over himself. His discomfort is gone, and he can go home clean. Like him, we find that most customers never want to go back to granular once they use the pelletized version.”
A Clear Look Ahead
Kevin and his team are constantly looking to advance the mark for enhanced safety, performance and durability. An emerging technology that’s gaining traction is our HPS®-8 integrated multipolymer, which is a unique binder system made up of multiple polymers to give road markings durability, long-term retro reflectivity and cure rates that surpass even thermoplastic markings.
We’re also looking at how we can extend the road-marking season for thermoplastics, which currently can be applied to roadways only when it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) or higher. A product that could be used at lower temperatures would be very valuable, especially because of the backlog in road projects.
Two other trends spurring changes in the road-marking industry are an increasingly aging population that has difficulty seeing in wet and dark driving conditions and cars with advanced driver assistance systems that require high-visibility road markings.
“Although we have existing products that provide the durability and retroreflectivity required for these two needs, we’re always assessing how the market is evolving to determine if other solutions are required. We also have to get existing solutions approved by the various city, county, state, provincial and federal transportation departments before they can be used. It can be challenging, but this is an industry where everyone knows each other and works collaboratively to help make our roads safer.”
ThermoDrop is a registered trademark of Southern Synergy LLC, used under license.
Ennis-Flint and HPS are registered trademarks of the PPG Group of Companies.