Global technology firm, SMX (Security Matters) has expanded its industrial rubber traceability platform to include latex and rubber gloves, extending its material-embedded identity technology to one of the largest and most complex post-use rubber waste streams. The expansion is the sixth application under the company’s circular rubber program and covers gloves used across healthcare, laboratory, pharmaceutical, food-handling, industrial and consumer settings.
The company said the move applies its rubber-integrity platform to a category where authentication, traceability and lifecycle accountability have been largely absent. SMX embeds invisible molecular markers directly into glove materials during manufacturing, linking each glove to a persistent and tamper-resistant digital record that remains verifiable throughout production, use and end-of-life handling.
Unlike tyres or engineered rubber components, gloves are typically collected as mixed, multi-source waste. Once used, they are difficult to sort or recover safely due to contamination risks, the inability to distinguish between latex, nitrile, neoprene and blended formulations, and the lack of verifiable origin or use history. These constraints have made glove recycling impractical at scale despite the underlying material value of rubber and latex.
By embedding identity into the material itself rather than relying on labels or documentation, SMX enables gloves to retain their identity after use, washing, shredding or processing. This allows verification of formulation, category and application class, supports traceability across the lifecycle, and enables contamination-aware segregation into safety-aligned recovery or restricted disposal pathways.
The expansion builds on SMX’s existing deployments across bicycle, vehicle and truck tires, conveyor belts and vibration-damping rubber components. Beginning in the first quarter, the company plans to work with manufacturers, glove users, waste handlers and recyclers to develop pilot programs, handling workflows, recovery pathways and certification-ready digital identity frameworks.