alt Hacker NewsThe chips are sub-cents per unit in terms of cost and weigh milligrams. RFID chips come in many flavours the ones most used are passive, i.e. basically just a bunch of wires printed on a tiny piece of carrier material. The label on a shirt contains more resources by weight.
Really only wires, or is there still a (tiny) chip on there somewhere?
While it can indeed be helpful as an indication, cost often doesn't factor in externalities such as pollution during production, and recycling after use. Paper has much fewer problems in those areas.