Environmental RFID: measuring the relevance in the fashion industry

Abstract

Fashion industry is globally one of the largest consumers of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, which has provided a best practice to manage inventories and respond to local desires. As the use of RFID has grown, the sustainability thriving fashion industry has turned to “green tags”. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the relevance of environmental RFID tags. The research was conducted in two stages: First, waste and emission reductions were accounted on a tag level. Second, the reductions were extrapolated to the brand-owner level analysing the impact of green tags by absolute measures and contribution to sustainability goals. According to the results, environmental RFID provides substantial improvements on a tag level, but limited impact holistically. Researchers note that although tags represent a small waste stream in the big picture, fashion companies may not have a choice. This paper is one of the first studies on environmental tags.