PulpaTronics creates paper RFID tag

In the UK, students from Imperial College London’s Dyson School of Design Engineering have developed paper RFID tags that they hope will address the circuitry waste that results from the cheap and disposable tags.

The four-person team, comprised of Chloe So, Barna Soma Biro, Rui Ma, and Jingyan Chen, have co-founded PulpaTronics to commercialize the idea. The all-paper tags store information geometrically by laser printing conductive carbon onto paper.

According to PulpaTronics, over 12 billion RFID tags are manufactured annually. Usually, they are not meant to be recycled and end up in landfills. Replacing 100,000 conventional RFID tags with PulpaTronics tags could reduce CO₂ emissions by 20 million kg, according to the startup.