[en] A superheated droplet detector (SDD) consists of a homogeneous suspension of micrometric superheated liquid droplets inside a viscous gel of matched density, each droplet functioning as a small bubble chamber. SDD is a promising technique to the measurement of low-intensity neutron fields, as detectors can be rendered insensitive to minimum ionizing radiations. We report on the intrinsic neutron-induced signal of C₂ClF₅ devices fabricated by our group that originate from neutron- and alpha-emitting impurities in the detector constituents. The neutron background was calculated via Monte Carlo simulations using the MCNPX-PoliMi code in order to extract the recoil distributions following neutron interaction with the atoms of the superheated liquid. Various nuclear techniques were employed to characterise the detector materials with respect to source isotopes (²³⁸U, ²³²Th and ¹⁴⁷Sm) for the normalisation of the simulations and also light elements (B, Li) having high (α,n) neutron production yields. We derived a background signal of about 10^-3 cts/day in a 1 liter detector of 1-3 wt.% C₂ClF₅, corresponding to a detection limit in the order of 10^-8 n.cm^-2.s^-1. Direct measurements in a massively shielded underground facility for dark matter search have confirmed this result. With the borosilicate detector containers found to be the dominant background source in current detectors, possibilities for further noise reduction by ∼2 orders of magnitude based on selected container materials are discussed