Once a large festival ends, the organizers are left with heavy waste at the venue. Knowing how to reuse the RFID chips in old festival wristbands can help you reduce environmental waste and future ticket printing expenses.
While the custom printed fabric straps are single use items that guests must cut off after the event, the electronic microchip sitting inside the plastic tag is highly durable. This simple guide will show you how to safely remove and reuse them for your next event.
How to Reuse the RFID Chips: Understanding the Concept
How do you reuse the RFID chips in old wristbands? To understand this, you must first look at how a smart ticket is put together. A standard RFID wristband is made of two parts.
The first part is the physical carrier, which is the woven or plastic strap that wraps around a guest’s wrist. It is deliberately designed to be single use for security reasons.
It uses a one-way sliding lock that bites into the fabric. Once a guest pulls the lock tight, they cannot loosen it again. The only method to take it off is to cut the fabric with scissors. Additionally, since the fabric is cut and soiled with sweat, it must be thrown away after the event.
The second part is the electronic inlay, which consists of the tiny microchip and wire antenna hidden inside the hard plastic tag. The silicon chip inside does not wear out or decay merely because a guest wears it for a few days.
No batteries or moving components are present in the microchip, and the chip is well protected against rain, mud, and water due to the outer hard plastic shell. The electronic chip will continue to work properly as long as the outer layer is not compromised.
How to Clear and Reset the Data (The Data Wipe)
Event planners often express concerns over the fact that old wristbands may still retain some personal information about the previous users. They fear that if the chip is re-used, it may connect a new user with information from a previous member or with an old credit card.
Fortunately, this isn’t how the technology functions. The chip has a read/write function, allowing easy writing and deletion of data.
Also, there is no personal identification stored on the microchip. Rather, it simply contains a Unique Identifier (UID), a unique static sequence of numbers.
This identifier is assigned to the chip at the time of manufacture and cannot be altered. Event software makes use of this UID as a digital reference mark for locating the attendee’s database profile.
Because the chip only holds a reference number, doing an RFID chip data wipe is highly straightforward. Your tech team does not need to erase the chip itself. Instead, they just need to log into the event database software and clear the old connections.
With a few clicks, the software wipes out the link between the chip’s ID number and the old guest’s profile. Once that link is gone, the chip becomes completely blank and anonymous again, ready to be linked to a brand-new ticket buyer for your next event.
Three Clever Ways to Collect and Reuse the RFID Chips
If you want to implement a recycling system, you need a smart way to get the credentials back from your guests without causing long lines at the exits. Event planners generally use three main methods to gather and repurpose their hardware.
- The Exit Gate Return Bins
The most typical way of gathering wristbands is to establish a recycling station at the main exit of the festival. When guests leave the grounds on the last night, staff members request them to cut off the wristbands and place them in the collection bin.
To boost participation, you can offer rewards in the form of a souvenir sticker, a ticket for the following year’s festival, or a raffle entry. This incentive increases the wristbands collected significantly.
- Detachable Plastic Slide Tags
If you want to make sorting easier, you can order a specific type of band that uses detachable smart tags. With this design, the plastic housing containing the chip slides onto the fabric ribbon like a bead.
At the end of the event, your staff can easily slide the plastic chip housing off the ribbon without cutting it. You can throw away the dirty fabric straps and put the clean plastic tags straight into a storage box, saving your team hours of manually cutting chips out of fabric loops later.
- Reusable Silicone Wristbands
When organizing events such as corporate conferences, gym subscriptions, or weeklong exhibitions, you should completely eliminate the use of fabric and choose reusable smart wristbands made of durable silicone. Silicone bands offer a premium appearance and can be easily stretched on a person’s hand and washed in bulk.
Once the event is finished, attendees will just return the bands to the registration desk. Your partner from the production factory will be responsible for cleaning and inspecting the bands before they are sent back to you for another project, preventing any waste.
Reuse the RFID Chips Economics: Cost vs. Labor Balance
Before starting a full recycling program, it is essential to consider the cost benefits in relation to human effort. For example, obtaining raw microchips in bulk at wholesale pricing is affordable because factory production keeps costs down.
Therefore, the money you save by harvesting old chips must be higher than the wages you pay staff to collect and sort them.
If you run a small corporate business meeting with only 500 attendees, a chip recovery program is probably not worth the effort. The total cost savings on 500 microchips will be small, and the labor required to manually clear them will outweigh the financial benefit.
However, if you are organizing a large-scale music event with 50,000 or 100,000 participants, the situation becomes very different. The cost of producing so many microchips saves you a large amount of money on manufacturing in the future.
Another important benefit of the large-scale recycling project is the successful promotion of your brand. Modern consumers prefer to support environmentally friendly companies; thus, when promoting their projects as waste-free events, they receive more tickets sold in greater numbers of customers than expected.
Conclusion
The microprocessor chips found in tickets can be reused instead of being discarded after just one weekend. Recycling is known to have logistical challenges, especially concerning the need for clearing all data stored in these chips, but the benefits in profit and ecology are very high if implemented by companies with large-scale operations.
By setting up exit collection bins or choosing detachable slide tags, you can easily implement a system to reuse the RFID chips. Get in touch with us during the early planning stages to choose the best materials and chip housings for your green goals.
