Creating a Truly Circular Economy with RAIN RFID Wireless Technology
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From food to fashion, consumers crave transparency about where companies’ products originate. In fact, according to a 2022 Food Industry Association Report, 64% of consumers said they would switch from their preferred brand to one with greater supply chain transparency.
With consumers increasingly concerned about the origins of products and the environmental impact of their purchases, RAIN RFID, a wireless technology that connects billions of everyday items to the internet, enables consumers and businesses to track items throughout their supply chain journey.
“We’re currently on a path to connect trillions of everyday items in people’s lives,” said Megan Brewster, the vice president of advanced technology at Impinj, the Seattle-based company behind the Impinj E910 RAIN RFID reader chip. “We envision a future where businesses and people can engage those items through their lifetime — from their birth at manufacturing, through the supply chain, in the retail stores to the point of sale, to the consumer's home, and eventually to recycling.”
In the latest episode of the Thomas Industry Podcast, Brewster explained that Impinj’s goal with RAIN RFID is to give every item a digital life to drive efficiencies, reduce waste, and improve people’s lives by creating a truly circular economy.
Cathy Ma, the host of the Thomas Industry Podcast, sat down with Brewster to explore the many use cases for RAIN RFID, how the traceable tags work, and how its capabilities position it as the leading item to cloud connectivity technology for the Internet of Things (IoT).
The Capabilities of RAIN RFID
RAIN RFID differs from other Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies because the chips don’t require a dedicated power source to operate. Instead, they are powered by radio waves.
To date, RAIN RFID is already connecting around 30 billion items yearly to the digital world, Brewster explained. The traceable technology’s reach is growing between 25 and 30% each year, as it’s added to everything from luggage to automotive parts due to its affordability and range of benefits.
“RAIN RFID provides core capabilities such as serialized identifiers, it’s battery-free, has up to a 30-foot range, and you don’t have to have a line of site in order to read RAIN tags,” Brewster said. “You can read thousands of RAIN tags per second, and it’s affordable. It’s essentially unlimited life.”
Through her years at Impinj, Brewster has discovered various ways that RAIN RFID can enable sustainability and circular recycling. The most significant opportunity for industry, she said, is the enablement of a circular economy for every single item that consumers buy, use, and discard.
“My job is to determine how RFID technology can help businesses and people ensure that the item, let’s say a t-shirt, is routed as efficiently as possible through the supply chain, it’s produced in the appropriate amount so you don’t run out of stock at your favorite retailer, and at the end of that t-shirt’s life, it will tell [consumers] how to recycle that t-shirt,” she said.
But the possibilities extend beyond clothing.
1. Enables Intelligent Recalls
“Coöperatie Hoogstraten is using the Impinj platform to track cartons of strawberries as they move from the farm to table,” Brewster said. “They’re seeking to maintain that freshness and reduce the chance of wasted fruit. Then in the event of a recall, only the affected product has to be taken off the market. You don’t have to recall everything.”
2. Improves Customer Service
Impinj is also working with the aviation industry to improve customer service and efficiency with accurate real-time data about luggage and equipment.
3. Streamlines Supply Chain Management
In the healthcare industry, RAIN RFID streamlines asset tracking, improving supply chain management and enhancing patient experiences.
4. Automates Manufacturing Processes
The technology also extends to the manufacturing sector, where its automating processes that “change the way machines and humans work together,” she said.
What RAIN RFID Tags Looks Like
“The [silicone] chips are extremely tiny,” Brewster said. “They’re the size of a flake of pepper or a grain of salt.”
While the tags are small, they have mighty capabilities. The RFID tag comprises a few different components and starts with a silicon chip that’s essentially the brain of the tag. The chip is inductively connected to an antenna that’s usually made of aluminum, with an overall size of about 70 millimeters long and 14 millimeters wide, but it comes in various sizes. The antennas are then inlaid on a piece of PET plastic.
“That inlay then gets converted into a label,” she said. “If it’s a paper tag that’s a hang tag on a piece of clothing, then it would be converted into that paper label. Then, at that stage, it’s encoded.”
“As we look to tag everything, we want different form factors. For example, if we’re going to tag every single tomato, we need a form factor that’s as small as those stickers that you currently find on produce,” she said. “There are tags that can be that small, but you have trade-offs. For example, with the read range, you might not be able to read it from 30 feet away. You may need to be a little closer.”
How SMBs Can Utilize RAIN RFID Tags
Small and medium-sized companies seeking to adopt RAIN RFID technology should start by clarifying their project's focus with what the company wants to get out of tracing its parts or products through the supply chain.
“Do you want to monitor all your work in progress across your workshop? Do you want to understand in great detail what you are shipping out of your dock doors to your customers?” Brewster asked. “It all starts with tagging your items.”
Once a company decides the scope of a project, it then has to figure out when and where during production, it is going to add a tag to an item. While some companies tag an item as soon as they receive it in-store for sale, many companies decide to push that tagging system upstream to their supply chain partners and all the way up to the point of manufacture so that the benefits of the tag can be achieved throughout the item’s lifecycle, Brewster said.
After your products are tagged, she says your next question should be: “When do you read those tags?” She posits that companies “might want to understand how a product flows through the manufacturing process for automation purposes, or they might want to ensure that [they] have the right item at the right place at the right time.” No matter the case, companies must identify where they want to read the item or have visibility into its identity and location.
The RAIN RFID adoption process may take time as a company evaluates its goals, but the benefits are worth the investment. Ultimately, improving supply chain visibility enhances the customer experience. With the ability to identify and find 1,000 items per second, even without direct line-of-sight, RAIN RFID is driving operational productivity and boosting sales for companies.
Listen to the Full Episode on the Thomas Industry Podcast
The full episode of the Thomas Industry Podcast dives deeper into the sustainability of RAIN RFID, how its capabilities extend to the IoT, and how Brewster has aligned diverse stakeholders to advance the technology. If you want to listen to the full episode, you can tune in on the platforms below.
Discover even more episodes of the Thomas Industry Podcast.
