Ningbo XISXI E-commerce Co., Ltd , https://www.petspetscare.com
Chief technology manager Manfred Rietzler said Smartrac is currently working on the development of this new technology because the company expects that RFID will soon be adopted by many new consumer applications, including ticketing and consumer product packaging.
Smartrac is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and employs approximately 2,600 people worldwide. The company manufactures RFID inlays for passports and contactless credit cards, and RFID tag cards for public transport systems. Smartrac now uses its expertise in label design and production to develop biodegradable label products.
Existing RFID tags consist of a thin polymer substrate (such as PVC or PET film), a metal antenna, and a silicon microchip. Its design does not take into account environmental impacts. Unlike most consumer packaging products, it can be recycled. Rietzler said. A standard Gen2 EPC tag is similar in composition to a package of potato chips. He explained that although the amount of aluminum contained in potato chips is more than ten times that of RFID tags.
With the exception of antennas and chips, the new generation of tags will consist entirely of degradable components. The company's research and development of biodegradable labels, Rietzler said, is the potential versatility of this technology in the near future.
"Because many different applications employ a large number of tags, it is a big challenge to collect all the tags and bring them to the recycle bin," Rietzler said. With biodegradable materials, chip and antenna recycling becomes easy. At the R&D center in Bangkok, Smartrac is now developing at least two types of label product lines.
The first type of label product - intended for use in consumer products and other applications where cycle and durability requirements are high - will use bio-polymeric materials with a tag life cycle of weeks or months. Rietzler refused to provide information such as materials or processes.
Rietzler said that such tags can be used to confirm the legitimacy and safety of food, track warehouse logistics, identify flight baggage and so on.
The second type of label will use a paper substrate that can be broken down within a few days. Antennas and microchips will be made of traditional materials until Smartrac decides whether it can produce biodegradable chips for the substrate of the wafer plate.
Paper RFID tags will be widely used in ticketing applications (including sporting events and public transportation), with a life cycle of hours or days, quickly decomposing once wet.
The passive tag applied to the ticket operates at 13.56 MHz. The company said that the goal is to achieve the industry standard reading distance - 10 cm. The operating frequency for consumer product application tags is ultra-high frequency (900MHz) and the read range is up to 10 meters.
Smartrac aims to produce labels that comply with all international standards, including the ISO14443, ISO15693, ISO18000-6c and EPCGen2 standards.
The tags were developed in collaboration with Smartrac's internal research team and two unnamed universities. Rietzler said that Smartrac currently negotiates with suppliers of materials from the United States and Japan. Although he declined to disclose further details about the project partners, he said everything went smoothly.
"One of the first issues that needs to be considered is stability and other factors such as the stability of reading distance and frequency. "The focus of our research is to ensure that the biodegradable tags work as normal labels," says Rietzler.
The Dutch RFID company Smartrac develops a new generation of green passive RFID tags to meet the needs of the wider use of RFID in the future. After the new label is used, it will be almost completely biodegradable for environmental protection purposes. The new label price will be similar to the current non-degradable RFID tag.