Sustainable roll-to-roll manufactured multi-layer smart label

International audienceAbstract Sustainability in electronics has a growing importance due to, e.g. increasing electronic waste, and global and European sustainability goals. Printing technologies and use of paper as a substrate enable manufacturing of sustainable electronic devices for emerging applications, such as the multi-layer anti-counterfeit label presented in this paper. This device consisted of electrochromic display (ECD) element, NFC (near field communication) tag and circuitry, all fully roll-to-roll (R2R) printed and assembled on plastic-free paper substrate, thus leading to a sustainable and recyclable device. Our setup uses harvested energy from HF field of a smartphone or reader, to switch an electrochromic display after rectification to prove authenticity of a product. Our novelty is in upscaling the manufacturing process to be fully printable and R2R processable in high-throughput conditions simulating industrial environment, i.e. in pilot scale. The printing workflow consisted of 11 R2R printed layers, all done in sufficient quality and registration. The printed antennas showed sheet resistance values of 32.9±1.9 mΩ/sq. The final yield was almost 1500 fully printed devices, and in R2R assembly over 1400 labels were integrated with 96.5% yield. All the assembled tags were readable with mobile phone NFC reader. The optical contrast (ΔE*) measured for the ECDs was over 15 for all the printed displays, a progressive switching time with a colour change visible in less than 5 s. The smart tag is ITO-free, plastic-free, fully printed in R2R and has a good stability over 50 cycles and reversible colour change from light to dark blue

Multiscale investigation of the fate of silver during printed paper electronics recycling

International audienceThe use of printed paper electronics in consumer goods is expected to experience a mass development in the next future. The ink used in these devices contains silver nanomaterials that may be released in the environment at the product end-of-life. We report here the first evaluation of the fate of silver during a pilot-scale recycling of printed paper electronics, made of paper printed with a cellulose nanofibrils-silver nanowire ink. We show that the released effluents are mainly free from silver, which is retained in the pulp conserved for recycling. We use atomic force microscopy experiments to show that this strong pulp-silver bond is due to the embedding of the silver nanowires in the pulp by coils of cellulose nanofibrils. We propose an estimate of the resulting adhesion stress of the nanowires to the ink, high enough to keep the silver inside the pulp during the recycling procedure

Sustainable roll-to-roll manufactured multi-layer smart label

Abstract Sustainability in electronics has a growing importance due to, e.g. increasing electronic waste, and global and European sustainability goals. Printing technologies and use of paper as a substrate enable manufacturing of sustainable electronic devices for emerging applications, such as the multi-layer anti-counterfeit label presented in this paper. This device consisted of electrochromic display (ECD) element, NFC (near field communication) tag and circuitry, all fully roll-to-roll (R2R) printed and assembled on plastic-free paper substrate, thus leading to a sustainable and recyclable device. Our setup uses harvested energy from HF field of a smartphone or reader, to switch an electrochromic display after rectification to prove authenticity of a product. Our novelty is in upscaling the manufacturing process to be fully printable and R2R processable in high-throughput conditions simulating industrial environment, i.e. in pilot scale. The printing workflow consisted of 11 R2R printed layers, all done in sufficient quality and registration. The printed antennas showed sheet resistance values of 32.9±1.9 mΩ/sq. The final yield was almost 1500 fully printed devices, and in R2R assembly over 1400 labels were integrated with 96.5% yield. All the assembled tags were readable with mobile phone NFC reader. The optical contrast (ΔE*) measured for the ECDs was over 15 for all the printed displays, a progressive switching time with a colour change visible in less than 5 s. The smart tag is ITO-free, plastic-free, fully printed in R2R and has a good stability over 50 cycles and reversible colour change from light to dark blue

Development of eco-efficient smart electronics for anticounterfeiting and shock detection based on printable inks

Printed electronics are expected to meet an increasing demand for improved functionality and autonomy of products in the context of Internet-of-Things. With this trend, the environmental performance of novel technologies is of growing importance. The current study presents the life cycle assessment of two novel devices: an anticounterfeit label based on the electrochromic display and a shock-detection tag based on the piezoelectric sensor, designed for the use in packaging of pharmaceuticals and luxury items to improve the safety and accountability in the supply chain. The devices are manufactured by means of energy-efficient printing techniques on a low-cost flexible and recyclable paper substrate. Comprehensive cradle-to-grave analysis contributes to industrial-scale energy and material life cycle inventories and identifies the main impact hotspots evaluated for a broad range of categories of the ReCiPe midpoint (H) impact assessment method. Results show that major impact burdens are associated with the near-field communication chip and radio-frequency identification antenna, while the impacts of solvents, process energy, electrochromic display/piezoelectric sensor, Li-ion battery, and substrate are comparatively small. In terms of their global warming potential, both the anticounterfeit label and shock-detection tag embody around 0.23 kg of CO2-equiv. Several material-use reduction and material-substitution strategies are quantified and discussed for their potential to reduce high impacts of the antenna.Expertise hub for a market uptake of energy-efficient supermarkets by awareness raising, knowledge transfer and pre-preparation of an EU Ecolabe

Matrix-driven environmental fate and effects of silver nanowires during printed paper electronics end of life

The fate and impact of silver nanowires incorporated in a paper-based nano-enabled product (NEP) was investigated in freshwater mesocosms