Biodegradable RFID Asset Tags
Environmental factors affect business decisions more and more as politicians and consumers become increasingly aware of the effect our society has on the environment. This is not restricted to the end-user, typically retail use of products such as recycling packaging, reducing gas consumption and so on, nor in the raw sources of materials, such as renewable resources, managing forests – but in the impact of interim production.
RFID tags are widely used in industry because of their flexibility and the high degree of utility and effectiveness they provide in tracking assets. RFID tags are used in the most extreme environments such as in the sea, where salt water acts as a highly effective corrosive or in sub-zero temperatures of Arctic oil production fields. The focus has been on developing RFID asset tags which are capable of handling anything that is thrown at them or where they are thrown into space!
The technology focus is now shifting to developing RFID asset tags which are biodegradable.
The idea stems in part from the tracking systems used in wildlife research and management. A radio collar or tag attached to an elephant of shark is simply a glorified RFID asset tag! The issue there has been to be able to remove the tag when the animal study has finished, without of course harming the animal. The automated removal of collars and tags did not address the issue of the biodegradability of the tag as in many instances it was designed to be recovered in order to collect the stored information. This altered when studies revealed tag recovery was not always possible or desirable and the issue became one of how to track an animal and allow the tag to degrade naturally, usually from within the body of the animal involved.
It has become a short lap in imagination to see the application of biodegradable asset tags to commercial use, however there are limited applications for biodegradable RFID asset tags outside of livestock management. The focus has therefore moved to how RFID tags can naturally degrade in the environment once they have been used combined with developing re-use strategies for both the RFID tags and the integral components.
Presently, RFID asset tags are typically manufactured from a silicon chip, a polymer substrate and a metal, radio antennae which is held together by adhesives. None of the typical components are environmentally friendly in terms of ability to decompose, while many of the materials could lend themselves to recycling and re-use if they could be effectively managed on a commercial scale currently not available.
Biodegradable RFID asset tags are still some way off but they are undergoing development at the time of writing (January 2010) and are likely to be introduced to market in the commercial short-term. Several companies at home and overseas are working on cracking the issues with biodegradability, notable the larger manufacturers which is probably as well as it is clear that one key to effective minimization of environmental impact will be to ensure standardization on a massive scale.
