An energy-saving technology
To date, the market has largely equated e-paper with e-readers, but the technology has uses beyond this single application.
For example, at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in the United States, the German automotive company BMW revealed a concept car called the iX Flow that used e-paper technology developed by E Ink to change its color on demand.
In the field of air transport, Netronix, E Ink, international luggage maker Rimowa, and airlines are working together to develop smart luggage that digitizes the information on luggage tags. Netronix CEO Alvin Lin explains that in 2019, the last full year before the Covid-19 pandemic, airlines worldwide carried a total of roughly 4.5 billion passengers, which required a truly startling number of luggage tags. The group subsequently began developing electronic luggage tags as a carbon reduction and sustainability measure.
In the department store and retail sector, workers spend a great deal of time and labor attaching price labels to shelves. Replacing these with electronic shelf labels (ESL) enables instantaneous changes and updates via wireless networks and RFID technology. Many large-scale retailers in other countries have already made the switch to ESLs.
In the smart healthcare space, Netronix noted the time and effort that it takes hospital workers to update patient charts by hand. It therefore partnered with domestic medical institutions including Taipei Veterans General Hospital, National Taiwan University Hospital, and Cathay General Hospital to develop e-paper charts that are wireless, save energy, and can be remotely updated at any time with new care information.
E-paper also has applications in a “smart city” setting. Lin points out that smart public transportation signage built with e-paper doesn’t need a backlight to provide clearly visible route and status information for buses regardless of the weather. More, the bistability of e-paper means that it retains information on the display even when the power goes out, making it especially useful for public announcements in the event of a natural disaster.
Lin walks us through a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the scale of energy savings from just ESLs: “Assuming the digital shelf labels already installed worldwide are updated once per day, they reduce the world’s carbon emissions by about 30,000 tons [per year]. A single tree absorbs about 12 kilograms of CO2 per year. That means it would take 2.5 million trees to balance out those emissions.”