A new electronic tag from Glasgow University could mitigate against the estimated 30 billion-plus single-use RFID tags that end up in landfills annually.
In a statement, co-author Dr Benjamin King from Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering, said: “The new technology we’ve developed uses materials which are cheap and widely available, and the tags can be manufactured using a simple, scalable process.
Our hope is that those unique characteristics could help the technology become widely-adopted in the years to come, helping to reduce the environmental harms currently being caused by single-use RFID tags.”
The researchers said their new tags could help reduce the retail sector’s reliance on RFID chips, which uses more than 10 billion tags each year. A tag’s combination of paper, plastic, silicon and metal makes them challenging to recycle, which is why they end up in landfill.
As well as identifying information and taking real time measurements of temperature, the tags could help create future generations of ‘smart packaging’ that also measure pH or humidity, providing retailers with warnings when food is at risk of spoiling or carrying harmful bacteria. The flexible and lightweight tags could also find use in healthcare and smart clothing, where they could unobtrusively monitor wearers’ vital signs.
The researchers discuss how they developed the technology and tested it in lab conditions. They show how the sensors can detect variations in temperature between 20°C and 110°C. This could make help make future wireless sensors cheaper and more sustainable, as fewer devices will now be required to cover the same temperature sensing range.
The tags are reported to have performed particularly well between 20°C to 60°C, the range most relevant for food safety and medical applications. They can react quickly to changes in temperature, taking seconds to register significant changes.
They also demonstrate how multiple tags can be read at once, showing three sensors providing information to the reader device simultaneously, and can function equally well at different distances from the reader