Monday, December 29, 2008

Green


How could RFID have saved thousands of tomatoes from destruction? "Industrial Control/Design Line" ran key ideas from my recent speech, "RFID and the Rise of Convenient Sustainability":

"The government of Hawaii got a well-deserved award at RFID World 2008, for a system of RFID tracking to promote food safety. With RFID tagging of every bin and case of produce, it can be tracked all the way from one corner of a field to the end-user, and then backtracked all the way to the field again, if there is a problem. When food recalls are necessary, they can be swift and small.

They can avoid the massive environmental wastefulness of fiascos like the one the US just went through, in which some people got sick, so we jumped on the tomatoes and threw away fields and fields full of somebody's tomatoes, somebody's irrigated and cultivated and fertilized and harvested and transported tomatoes, and then decided it wasn't tomatoes after all and threw away fields and fields of somebody else's peppers. Sinking tanker ships is not the only way to waste fossil fuels and damage the environment. Food safety regulators, unaided by RFID, can be drunken sailors too."

To see more "RFID and the Rise of Convenient Sustainability"go to industrialcontroldesignline.com/210604775?pgno=3