I-Corps: Photonic Fiber Barcodes for Integrated Textile Traceability and Sorting

Award ID: 2325764

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an indelible labelling system for textiles, footwear, and other products. The goal of the proposed technology is to enable authentication, manufacturing life cycle tracing, and enhance sorting efficiency for reuse, repair, or recycling at the end-of-life. Over 85% of textiles currently end up in landfills, despite a recent study indicating 74% of low-value, post-consumer textiles are readily available for fiber-to-fiber recycling and the expected market for recycled textiles to be $10 billion by 2028. A key challenge in implementing fiber-to-fiber recycling is feedstock ambiguity. Over 29% of post-consumer clothing lacks a legible care label, while 41% have inaccurate labels. To realize a functional circular economy for textiles domestically and worldwide, and the associated positive social impacts, a functional, robust labeling and tracing system is required. In addition to the issue of textile waste created by lack of end-of-life management, there also is the challenge of illegal import of counterfeit goods, which is estimated to cost $33.6 billion in wages and benefits to employees in the US, and $7.2 billion in lost tax revenue every year. This I-Corps project is based on the development of an all-organic, recyclable fiber directly integrated into a fabric or garment during manufacture that has an engineered photonic signature to provide an indelible label. The proposed technology is readable using both hand-held and high-throughput optical sorting systems at point-of-sale and recycling facilities. In the apparel industry, product life cycle management is hampered, in part, by inaccurate, poorly readable, and detachable standard care labels. Instead, this project seeks to enable a labeling system capable of being integrated into the fabric itself, that is intrinsically recyclable, low-cost, encodes information, and allows rapid readout after years of normal use. In this work, all-polymer photonic crystals are designed and then fabricated by thermal drawing with >100 layers having sub-micrometer individual thickness and low refractive index contrast, enabling the creation of unique optical signatures at visible and infrared wavelengths. The fibers optical design also enables the use of overtone peaks to avoid overlap with parasitic molecular absorption, substantially improving the signal-to-noise ratio (and, therefore, ease and speed) of readout. The ability to produce kilometers of fiber that are compatible with existing textile manufacturing processes, coupled with low input material cost, make the proposed technology a potential market-viable improvement over the standard care label. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman