RFID at the Intersection of Sustainable and Smart Packaging

Peter Bloch, market development manager for North America, Avery Dennison: Avery's been involved in some recycling tests, and [an RFID] label on corrugated is still recyclable, even if it has the RFID, and that comes out in the wash. There are other impurities, of course, on that carton when it's being recycled. But like Ruben [Nance] mentioned again, on plastics, on some other item level, products present other challenges, and we’re just not there in evaluating what those all are yet.

Nance: Or if somebody tries to compost the corrugated cardboard. Now we have other problems.

Sher, moderator: So where is RFID growing most now? Where are the opportunities, and how does that impact sustainability?

Parker: For the first time ever, at least for UHF RFID, the amount of labels being deployed outside of apparel use cases is exceeding that of apparel. Apparel has been the big consumer of RFID for years and years, pretty much since its implementation and commercialization, but now we're starting to see growth in other areas. Food is one, with FSMA [Food Safety Modernization Act] 204 regulation in the U.S. Then certainly there’s pharma. Logistics is huge, and UPS is not shy about announcing their adoption of RFID and their plans to put RFID on every package ship. So that's a that's quite a major adoption, and I would anticipate of the logistics companies following that lead. So there's just a few of the areas with adoption happening.

Nance: Beyond [non-apparel spaces in CPG and logistics], there are opportunities within the reclaimer space and within the sustainability space. For supply chain management, there’s just a lot of supply chain data that's coming from these facilities, and there's an exponential amount of information that's available to us. So as a sustainability professional, I see that data as a very easy way to integrate into my GHG (Green House Gas) reporting, or into my carbon footprint calculations, to a scale that has never been done before. How many people in this room have had some experience either creating or reading an LCA? Can I see a show of hands so the select few can commiserate with me? [Many in the room raise their hands] There are a lot of assumptions that need to be made without data. There’s a lot of, basically, guessing that needs to happen if you don't have that supply chain data. But now, the ability to track, product by product, individual SKU by individual SKU, allows you to create a much better and more detailed picture of your carbon footprint tracking.

Also in the reclaimer industry, many of you have probably heard of Holy Grail and Holy Grail 2.0 looking to segregate black plastics or hard-to-recycle materials. A lot of what we do in the Reclaim reclamation industry utilizes optical scanning, visual scanning, or some sort of scanning system to identify what a package is and segregate it into the right for a claim stream. By integrating these types of technologies, there's a ton of opportunity there to divert more good quality plastic into the areas that we need it to be diverted to, where we just currently cannot do it due to inefficiencies in our current technologies.

Sher, moderator: RFID and smart labels - how are people really using them to promote sustainability and recyclability today?

Bloch: We talked about carbon footprint, and it is a hard thing to measure. You start with what you buy, and then what you burn, but then what you borrow is the rest of the computation that you have to go through to get to your carbon footprint. And if you have a stream of information coming back, that maybe AI can compute, that says, ‘this much of your product got recycled,’ or ‘this much didn't,’ or ‘this is the recycling method that works better than others,’ those can really get us further along in the computation of what we're borrowing to come up with our carbon footprint. There are many ways that, when you RFID tag a package, you have real time visibility to those products, you can better manage them, and there's many ways that then become more efficient and have less waste, which computes into that carbon footprint. You also have more safety, and many other desirable ROI factors that can drive that whole needed function of shaping our planet as we go forward.

Sher, moderator: Ruben [Nance], can talk about ‘eco-friendly” labels?

Nance: What do you mean by eco-friendly? Because that's a loaded term.

Sher, moderator: For instance, putting on RFID tags that used to have a PET backing or inlay, and switching to paper backings—those types of types of things.

Nance: First and foremost, for something to be “eco-friendly,” it needs to be eco-friendly for whatever the end destination is. A paper label in a reclaimers plastic screen is not going to favorable—there's going to be contamination. There's going to be plugged filters, there's going to be wastewater issues. We don't want to see paper in that plastic stream if we don't have to. Beyond that, it's matching like with like, or miscible with miscible, or creating the ability to segregate out those things that aren't miscible. If you have an olefin-based substrate, you likely want an olefin-based label on it, or a label that's going to completely liberate and segregate itself from the package.

Beyond that, with additional opportunities in that space, I’d like call out SPC’s (Sustainable Packaging Coalition) How2Recycle. They just announced that they’re digitizing their labels with QR codes. A consumer can now interact with their package and determine if it’s recyclable at his or her local municipality, or just answer the question, ‘how do I dispose of this?’

Now, the general consumer doesn't know how to recycle. They think they know how to recycle, but it's incredibly complex. We see things every day that we think are recyclable, like full sleeve labels on a general consumer goods product—depending on what that label is made of, that product's likely never going to find its way to be a recycled product. It’s going to take very long and expensive for the landfill. So having that consumer interaction and direction on the front end, and allowing them to determine what the most viable appropriate path is for their packaging has immediate impacts, both from a sustainability standpoint, and from a reclamation industry standpoint. A lot of what's coming out from that municipality in those bails that are being created, are probably 30% to 40% contamination. A lot of that is due to the makeup of those containers, the recyclability of the containers, not the efficiencies of the reclaimer. The more quality material that we can get in, however we do it, it's going to have immediate and drastic impacts.

Sher, moderator: That’s a good point, and AI has ability to look at these things as well, and based upon what it's finding, it has the ability to look at a watermark, and be able to determine what to do with it, how best to recycle it. The future of this space could go in many different directions. We’ve got choices in terms of technology. We’re talking RFID. We've heard about BLE, we've got [digital] watermark, we've got NFC, we've got barcodes. There's plenty of technology choices. All these technologies generate data, and when you have data, everybody thinks about AI and the ability for AI to actually do something with it to improve sustainability.

Nance: Optimistically, what I see as being a benefit of this technology and how it can help my part of the industry beyond that consumer interaction piece, and getting more material into recycling and composting streams, is having uniformity between the different types of technologies, or ability to read those technologies at the actual reclaimers to provide additional levels of sortation is a huge opportunity. We know that the Holy Grail, Digimarc and Pellenec, they've integrated their systems together. Pellenc is an optical sortation manufacturer, which is one of the key pieces of equipment that a reclaimer line that sorts packaging matierials by whatever their base resin is—PET, polypropylene, HDPE—but integrating the ability to read smart label technologies with those optical sort manufacturers, creating a cohesive, uniform system across the industry opens a lot of doors, and there's a huge need there. Right now, we have a ton of states and a ton of brands that have established minimum recycled content legislation or commitments. Quite honestly, there is not enough recycled content in the world to facilitate even a fraction of all those commitments. And a lot of the reasons for that are because of the applications that are needed. Might be food contact, or very high quality, and it's very difficult to get there in a mechanical reclamation system just due to all the contamination and other things that are present. The more that we see the integration of AI and smart labeling technology, the ability to sort more accurately, more precisely in a high-quality stream, we're going to open up more avenues for those that have made the commitments to purchase that material. We're going to create new high-quality material streams to facilitate needs that can't be facilitated yet. There's a huge frontier here. There's a huge opportunity. But having that cohesive interaction between the recycling manufacturer, equipment manufacturers, and those developing the technology and allowing them to communicate together is really that piece of the puzzle that needs to happen.

Peter Bloch, market development manager for North America, Avery DennisonBloch: The digital passport regulations are real in Europe, and because Americans are a little behind the eight ball there. As we learn, as we tag, and have greater visibility, we can learn more. And that's how to sort it better, how to get involved more as a consumer. I think we all want to do the right thing, but RFID technology can shine a light on it, give us visibility, and help us all take a more active part.

Audience question: From the RFID side, obviously, with the industry pushing for recyclability and pushing to go “linerless” with labels. Where will we go with RFID insertion when we go linerless?

Nance: It's really going to depend on the substrate. We have different guidance for every base resin material. What works for PET doesn't work for polypropylene. What works for polypropylene may not work for HDPE. A lot of that is dependent on where it is applied to the bottle. It's always like with like, and unlike needs to be separated. If you have something that is potentially going to contaminate the base substrate, say it's a PET, and you have a HDPE antenna that's likely going to sync with the pet. We utilize float/sink as the primary means of segregating materials based on density. You know that material is going to stay with the PET if it's adhered to it, or even if it releases to it. So make sure that the RFID in your package is designed to be compatible with the system. The inverse, if you're not able to design that linerless tag to be compatible with that base resin, then look at other applications on the package. Can it float with the label? Is the label an olefin substrate that's going to float? Could I apply [RFID] to it, and allow that to float out and not remain with the PET? Can I put it on a closure? Can be integrated somewhere else? It really is not a uniform decision. There isn't a uniform direction. It needs to be almost a case-by-case scenario, which with each individual package type to determine where that RFID or where that label is going to perform the best.

Bloch: You can insert an RFID inlay into a linerless label, it just, it's the stack up. Where does the adhesive join the face sheet? And you got to get the RFID tag in between two and who's doing what. And I think converting technologies will advance as we move more and more towards that. PW