The Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced that it has developed a textile marking system to track the presence of US-made yarns and fabrics in apparel imports.

The DOC wants to employ such a system to ensure the use of US fabrics and yarns, when required, in apparel products imported under US preference programmes and free trade agreements.

The ORNL's marking system is based on a near-infrared (just beyond visible red light) material that can be used as a marker, geometric figure, or bar code, with millions of letter and number combinations. The marker, which can only be read by special scanners, identifies the source, type, production conditions, and composition of textile material.

The lab says this system is far less expensive on a per taggant basis than other information encoding systems that have been considered, including those that use DNA or radio frequency identification (RFID). The near-infrared technology may also offer a number of distinct advantages, such as no impact on material properties and multiple uses at a lower cost.

According to the ORNL, recently completed tests confirm that this process works and can survive the textile manufacturing process. The next phase of the project will involve field tests to gain a better understanding of the stability of materials after being tagged; i.e., whether the marker has an effect on the fabric quality.

In addition, researchers will investigate the optimum method for depositing the tag onto the material and seek to answer a number of other questions involving the many variables of the process