RFID Environmental Concerns: Staying Green Friendly With Bill Arnold, Omron RFID
RFID Connections: Omron has recently introduced an ISO 15693-Compliant (or the 13.56 MHz) inlay with an aluminum antenna. What are the general performance characteristics of aluminum versus copper in terms of effective read and write ranges?
Bill Arnold: Aluminum for OMRON has always been less responsive, especially for the HF frequency ranges. So we investigated very carefully before making a decision to convert any of those HF inlays that we've been making for many years to aluminum from copper. We were very happy to find that with our design capabilities we were able to provide performance that was equivalent to the copper designs that we had out before.
RFID Connections: What are the benefits of aluminum over copper?
Bill Arnold: Aluminum is probably one of the world's most available resources, so there are a couple of benefits for a company like OMRON that is highly conscious of the environment. And we consider ourselves a green friendly corporation. Aluminum has better characteristics than copper from a disposable viewpoint, especially if you're talking about very large quantities of tags that are likely to be used only once or twice and then be disposed either into incinerators or landfills. So aluminum is more environmentally friendly from that point of view, especially if it's being incinerated. The other benefit is because aluminum is so plentiful in our world, it doesn't harm the environment from the mining operation to produce it. So, both of those we think are positive.
RFID Connections: Can you briefly describe ROHAS? (Reduction of hazardous substances and material waste)
Bill Arnold: ROHAS is a global standard that's been put into place to reduce materials that are produced by manufacturers, especially products that are discarded in large quantities and placed into our landfills and therefore have the potential of harming our environment. There is a list of ROHAS products that are to be avoided during manufacture. Some of these include such things that we would naturally think of such as mercury and lead. There is an awful lot of reduction of silver content because of some of the reactions that manufactured silver products have when discarded in large quantities.
So things like solder and those materials are looked at very extensively for electronics products. One of the keys to Omron's ROHAS stance for our RFID inlays is the manufacturing process that we use incorporates a welding technique that does not involve the use of adhesive which also have a side trace element of harmful chemicals that can find their way into the ground water if discarded in large amounts.
ROHAS, as it is today, is a global standard. It's looked at very aggressively in Europe. I think it will become more popular and better known in the US as we go forward as more environmental concerns tend to drive more of our manufacturing and our disposal type of decisions.
RFID Connections: Since the RFID chip is essentially silicon, are there are materials in an RFID inlay besides the antennae that might cause environmental concerns?
Bill Arnold: A lot of the techniques used to manufacture RFID antennae involve the use of some specialty heat-cured adhesives, which do generate trace elements of potentially harmful chemicals. Our product does not involve any of those or produce any of those and we're very happy about that.
RFID Connections: What types of applications do you see as being most appropriate for this kind of inlay and why?
Bill Arnold: We have a family of HF inlays, so the initial product that we brought out is most appropriately used in areas like library book tracking along with other types of friendly asset tracking. I call it "friendly" because HF products don't tend to give you a very long read range due to the method of communications coupling used with HF. So you're looking at a maximum read distance, even with the largest antennae that we make, of maybe three to four feet with large antennas. There is a lot of use of them for paper types of products, and they're also used extensively in loyalty and ID badge types of encapsulated forms. That would really be the reason for those; the read range and the automated read range is not as difficult to accomplish as in, say, a lot of the logistics applications we're doing with UHF.
RFID Connections: Do you have any other thoughts? What have I missed in regards to environmental issues or ROHAS compliance?
Bill Arnold: I don't think there's much to add other than OMRON has as a corporate policy that all products that we sell from April of this year (2006) forward will be ROHAS compliant. We've actually pulled some products from sale when they have not been redesigned adequately to meet the ROHAS standard which shows the level of commitment that we have to that. I have some orders still pending, the re-release of some our products that have been redesigned that didn't quite meet the high standards that we had set, so they're still being retooled so that when they come out they will fully meet the global standard. And we're seeing a lot of value in that, especially in our sales in Europe and the Asia Pacific region right now.
Bill Arnold, Chief Strategist, Omron RFID Division
With a background of over 25 years in sales, marketing and project management for Fortune 500 companies, the last seven with Omron Electronics, Bill Arnold was a natural choice to be put in charge of the development and deployment of Omron's strategic initiative to deploy RFID solutions in North America. As Omron Electronics product marketing manager, Bill grew sales in the Networks and I/O Products division by $1 million in years and delivered the company's first sales certification training. He then took on the implementation of Omron's company–wide strategic sales plan, shortening deployment timing by two months and in his current role as chief strategist for Omron's RFID division, he has led an effort that has generated $2.5 million in sales of RFID inlays to label converting companies and continues to foster strategic alliances with label converting companies and other partner companies.
In his career, Bill has thrived in several different sales positions for companies like Honeywell, Square D, GE and GE/MicroSwitch. He joined Omron Electronics in 1999 after three years of leading new business development of the Honeywell MicroSwitch division.
Bill is a graduate of University of Texas-Austin where he received a BA in Biology. He then entered military service and retired as a Captain in the US Marine Corps. He then furthered his education in the MBA program at Cal-State Fullerton, earning 12 graduate credits before beginning his distinguished career in sales.
In his current position, Bill has represented Omron RFID as a guest speaker for The Conference Board and at the Mark Andy RFID Focus educator seminars. Mr. Arnold also represents Omron at AIM Global.
About Omron
Omron Corporation is a global leader in the field of automation with $5.7 billion in annual revenue. Established in 1933 Omron has more than 26,000 employees in over 35 countries. Omron has been in the RFID business for over 20 years. An EPCglobal member, Omron offers a wide range of RFID products including inlays and readers for HF (13.56 MHZ), UHF (860-960MHz) and other frequencies.