Abstract
This article explores the current and future technological pathways of RFID components and quantifies their environmental impacts through life cycle assessment (LCA), and also covering the critical materials and energy use of tags, readers, and backend servers. We assess RFID-enabled lithium-ion battery supply chains with different cathode chemistries – lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA), nickel cobalt manganese oxide (NCM) as case applications. The results indicate that miniaturization and novel antenna materials can reduce the current environmental impacts of tags and readers by 60 % and 4 %, respectively. Direct energy consumption and antennas are the main contributors for tags, while microcontrollers and transceivers are the main contributors for readers. Furthermore, the overall environmental improvements of RFID system outweigh their additional environmental impacts. The use of RFID systems in optimizing battery supply process gives higher reductions in climate change and abiotic resource depletion impacts than switching to low-carbon battery chemistries (i.e. using NCM instead of NCA).
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