Circular Economy and E-Waste: An Opportunity from RFID TAGs

In this work, a deep economic and technical analysis for the enhancement of e-waste hierarchy applied to the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags is presented. Nowadays, the RFID technology represents a valuable solution for many applications to improve the quality and efficiency of the supply...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences 2019-08, Vol.9 (16), p.3422
Main Authors: Condemi, Alessia, Cucchiella, Federica, Schettini, Domenico
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access control
Circular economy
Clothing industry
Codes
Design for recycling
e-waste
Electronic waste
Environmental impact
extended producer responsibility (EPR), environment
Identification systems
Internet of Things
Legislation
Magnetic cards
Radio frequency identification
Radio-tagging
recycle and reuse
RFID tags
Supply chains
Sustainable design
Tags
Taxation
Textiles
WEEE
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Summary:In this work, a deep economic and technical analysis for the enhancement of e-waste hierarchy applied to the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags is presented. Nowadays, the RFID technology represents a valuable solution for many applications to improve the quality and efficiency of the supply chain, as well as for enhanced people or object identification and smart devices. This leads to massive usage of such devices that could represent a threat to the environment, since they are often considered as generic waste and no specific e-waste policy has been identified for RFID. For these reasons, the paper presents a study based on the desk research technique to propose several possibilities currently available for producers of different RFID devices in order to mitigate this problem at every e-waste hierarchy stage, i.e., ecological design and prevention, reuse, recycle, and disposal. Moreover, a cost/benefit analysis has been reported in order to highlight the economic advantages related to the RFID tags reuse, as well as environmental impact reduction. Results proved that passive RFID tags represent the major candidate for the e-waste hierarchy enhancement at every level, demonstrating that it is more convenient for the producer to consider an ecologically aware design and promote a take-back system for tags in order to take advantages from the solution proposed for the RFID e-waste hierarchy.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app9163422