Plasmonic Structural Colors for Plastic Consumer Products

Today colorants, such as pigments or dyes, are used to color plastic-based consumer products, either as base for solid colored bulk polymer or in inks for surface decoration. After usage, the products must be mechanically sorted by color before recycling, limiting any large-scale efficient recycling effort. As an alternative to chemistry-based coloring, nano-scale structural coloring has been proposed to reduce the number of materials needed and to increase pattern resolution. Here colors are created by structural based light-matter interactions in the surface. Thereby, the sorting by color can be avoided in the recycling state. Plasmon color technology based on aluminum has recently been firmly established as a route towards structural coloring of polymeric materials. We report on the fabrication of colors by localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPR) using roll-to-roll printing and demonstrate a route for scalable production and commercial uptake of plasmonic colors.