Polymeric Photonic Crystal Fibers for Textile Tracing and Sorting

Abstract

Circular supply chains require more accurate product labeling and traceability. In the apparel industry, product life cycle management is hampered in part by inaccurate, poorly readable, and detachable standard care labels. Instead, this article seeks to enable a labeling system capable of being integrated into the fabric itself, 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 (Δn = 0.1). The fibers exhibit reflectance features in the 1–5.5 µm wavelength range, characterized using insitu Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Drawn photonic fibers are then woven into fabrics, characterized by near-infrared spectroscopy and short-wave infrared imaging, techniques commonly used in industrial facilities for sorting materials. 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 these a potential market-viable improvement over the standard care label.Over 85% of textiles currently end up in landfills, despite a recent study indicating 74% of low-value, post-consumer textiles could be recovered via fiber-to-fiber recycling. A key challenge in implementing fiber-to-fiber recycling is feedstock ambiguity, and in this work, a polymeric photonic tracer fiber is proposed as a method to enable more efficient life cycle tracing and sorting.