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Comment by petemir | Hacker News Reader

My dream: to have every supermarket item embedded with an RFID tag so I can have a constantly up-to-date pantry inventory, with notifications of out-of-stock or near-expired products.

Yes, I am too lazy.

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Would also be interesting for household garbage recycling at the recycling plant. If you can ask your garbage "what are you" and it responds "I'm a polystyrene yogurt cup with an aluminum lid", separating it gets really easy.

There should be sufficient incentive for trash and recycling service providers to implement sensing and sorting now that "Making hydrogen from waste plastic could pay for itself" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886955

If manufacturers had to pay for waste management they would immediately reduce single use packaging consumption. Yogurt tubs instead of single serve cups. Beer bottles can be standardized, collected after use, sanitized, refilled, and put back onto grocery shelves.

In Germany they have to, but most of the plastic still gets burnt. Market failure. With paper, glass, aluminium and tin plate the numbers (and the economics) are better.

At least in some parts of Italy (I was in the Lombardy region) you pay an annual garbage tax where they provide you yearly with a predetermined amount of bags containing an RFID tag. You can still ask for more bags if needed, and I guess that in that case your tax would get adjusted depending on usage (which they track with the RFIDs). Kind of unsettling though that they could link your trash back to you.

I'm surprised retailers like Whole Foods haven't added something like this to purchases made in store tied to an Amazon account. At the point of sale they have access to best-buy dates, etc (or could even add it during inventorying) and could use that data to alert you to restock with better granularity than sending a reminder based on your shopping trip frequency.

I wrote a system for this for my house.

Entry of the expiry date is manual, and I haven't implemented notifcations yet, but barcodes solve most of the rest of the issues.

Why isn't this possible with barcodes?

Barcodes on products only have UPC/EAN information, which identifies a product, but not its expiration or batch.

Furthermore, I find that barcodes are a bit more picky w.r.t. how to scan them, while RFID is easier.

Depends of the orientation of the tag and the background interference from other sources (or other tags).

It is possible if the barcode would carry longer serial numbers for identification, not classification of the certain product. The dream of rfid proponents in the nineties was to push a whole pallet through a gate and get a super quick control of packing list at arrival. That would not be possible with optical scanning without unpacking the whole pallet. In production, under somewhat controlled conditions, Barcode ids for parts are used for decades.

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