QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I thought they could be useful for e.g. boxed lunches at a conference, or printed on a "mom and pop" restaurant menu, or in a cookbook, where maintaining a central database isn't really practical (aside from avoiding tracking).
It would also be easy to encode things like "Vegan" or "meat-free" or "contains nuts" which could be helpful to blind/low-vision folks or people who don't want to read through a 50-ingredient list to find out something contains shrimp extract or whatever.
I only got as far as setting up a domain (https://nut.codes) and a couple of aborted attempts at prototyping (https://github.com/nut-codes).
It's crazy that all the pieces have been there for decades but the idea that you should be able to talk about "the URL of this label (a document)" is nearly unfathomable for professionals who spend a huge chunk of their waking hours ostensibly building "the Web".
There's an easier way to do that: look for the label on the front that says "nut-free", or the label that says "may contain nuts" or "processed in a facility that processes nuts", or the primary ingredient that is not a nut, etc. No phone and app needed, no encoding data, anyone can do it, it's easy to find. Plus it's not easy to adopt a machine-encoding standard to changes in trends or society (like the difference between "contains nuts" and "processed in a facility that may process nuts"). We also already have OCR that can read all this text, and it's all laid out in a uniform way, so machine processing isn't that hard for existing labels.
More tracking!
And what do entrepreneurs care? They send the bottles back to Coca-Cola regardless. The Coca-Cola truck comes, picks up crates of empty bottles and drops off crates of full bottles.
From the way it's written, it sounds like it's a tool for Coca-Cola to track bottle usage, to separate bottles into separate streams for reuse and now-can-be-recycled.
Coca-cola had a 2.7B EBTDA last quarter. Marketing needs to stop blowing smoke up people's rears.
If they care about the environment, they can just use glass! Install mega watts of renewables to provide the power for glass recycling. Zero plastic in the environment.
Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it.
PET bottles are widely recycled, at something like 90% in Norway and 80% in Japan. Versus 25-30% in the US. The issue in the US is literally that people just throw them in the trash or on the side of the road, outside of the six states that have a deposit.
Statista link, with some of the rough figures corroborated by Wikipedia:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166550/plastic-bottle-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
The issue is the lack of will, and opposition, to actually put them in a place where the materials can be recycled...and to make it cheaper (through tax incentives) to recycle the material than to use new plastic.
Those glass bottles would end up in the trash or in the road too, as things stand. It's where I already see them go most of the time. Moving from a recycling-friendly state to a southern state has been infuriating in that regard.
Again coca-cola can make the full logistical operation EV based (bar maritime) and offset with deploying renewables. If they care.
Glass can be either washed (even more energy saving) or fully recycled, all the time, 100% of the time.
PET :
- can only be recyclable a few N cycles and becomes increasingly brittle when recycled.
- There is no such thing as transparent recycled PET
Those are the two core reasons why none of the major manufacturers actually use recycled PET or use it fractionally (10 to 30% PET, which marketing will spin with 'using (some) plastic from 100% recycled materials')
The sad story about the economics of this is that recycled PET is not nearly good quality enough to be used for packaging leading to it being used in plastic poles or road substrates and further contributing to microplastics in the waterways.
It's a scam through and through.
People need to start taking responsibility for their complicity in the world's problems, rather than blaming everyone but themselves and demanding someone else fix all their problems and pay for it too.
I think a lot of people like glass, but I haven't seen a recycler want it in a long time. So is it more responsible to buy glass that you know is going in the trash, or plastic that might be recycled? It's not obvious.
Perhaps that is a US problem, in Europe glass recycling is fairly Universal at all recycling centres and most neighbourhood streets have below ground waste containers for glass.
At least in my reality the issue is that Retailers have virtually eliminated glass alternatives from supermarket shelves. Other than beer/wine and some 1.5L juice bottles, pretty much everything else is plastic, even when the same product is also manufactured in glass, it simply does not exist in supermarket shelves.
You have to go to very large distribution centres to actual find glass alternatives for everyday products. So to me turning this into a consumer issue is naive.
I would be interested to know if your country subsidizes the glass recycling or if it is legally mandated. I'm also curious about relevant regulations in the US too. It might be the case that we require a level of sterilization for bottles that is more strict than other countries, that makes it uneconomical to recycle. There are so many possible factors. Recycling is a very low-profit industry and it is often operated at a loss. In some cases the recyclers throw away almost everything, keeping only certain easily separable stuff like aluminum cans and clean cardboard.
Bottle washing here only happens if you return the bottles at a supermarket or other retailers, who then return it (unbroken) to the original manufacturer.
Organic food is a perfect example. They incur more losses and operations are more expensive, but they charge a premium and profit from our demand. In other cases they remove harms when it threatens their profits. Antibiotics, rBST, etc in milk are scary, so milk producers remove them and advertise they're now less bad for us, so we buy that milk more.
But in order for those cases to happen, consumers had to demand the product change. And the only reason consumers demanded it was fear. They were afraid they were being poisoned, so they demanded change; producers feared for their profits, and made changes.
Sadly, consumers don't give a shit about the environment. If they did they would have demanded an end to disposable plastics decades ago, when it was widely known the kinds of pollution the packaging was causing. We didn't care then, we don't care now. Not enough to act, anyway.
But luckily, and kind of amazingly, "Government" is doing what it's supposed to do. Very slowly, laws are being passed at local and state level to set deadlines to curtail or eliminate disposable products. Sometimes the laws have no teeth, but it's a step in the right direction (even if it does take decades to take effect). But lobbyists will fight this and try to convince consumers the change is bad, so the companies don't have to spend money to change.
If consumers want the change to happen soon, they must demand it themselves. They do it when they're afraid just fine; waiting for them to be afraid enough may be too late.
>If consumers demanded glass, they'd charge us a premium and happily provide glass, and make a profit off our demand.
That is exactly what happens now. You can get soda and beer in glass but it costs more. Bottled wine costs more than similar boxed wine. I'm sure there is a small difference with many other products too.
>Sadly, consumers don't give a shit about the environment. If they did they would have demanded an end to disposable plastics decades ago, when it was widely known the kinds of pollution the packaging was causing. We didn't care then, we don't care now. Not enough to act, anyway.
They do care but plastic has been recycled for decades now. Perhaps it is not the most recyclable material but lots of consumers are on board with some kind of recycling system, and reuse plastic stuff in their own lives outside of commercial recycling.
>Very slowly, laws are being passed at local and state level to set deadlines to curtail or eliminate disposable products.
On this subject, paper straws are the worst and have been proven to exude toxic chemicals. To add insult to injury, you have to store them in plastic wrappers to be sure they stay dry.
Reducing the amount of plastic in use is generally a low priority for government. It's a slow problem with many solutions that don't involve banning things.
>They do it when they're afraid just fine; waiting for them to be afraid enough may be too late.
There's not an obvious "too late" for plastic. It's a slow problem. Even the seemingly huge amount of plastic out there can be picked up and handled in various ways. The bigger issue is the microplastics that are difficult to collect. The idea that you can drive up to buy a $7 drink in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, and be refused a straw that actually works, really pisses people off. There are much more important forms of pollution that could be addressed, like the artificial chemicals and pesticides in our food.
Another example of a bad policy is the ban on plastic bags. While this might make sense sometimes, every time someone forgets their bags or even runs out of bags unexpectedly during checkout, they end up buying bags anyway. The bags for sale are often restricted to the heavy reusable kind, which are made as cheap as possible for the occasion and are not attractive or durable enough to be saved indefinitely. These bags have been found to generate more waste in some cases than letting people do what they think is right. A lot of people use the ordinary thin plastic bags around the house until they fall apart anyway, and some stores collect them for recycling as well.
Does anyone even recycle glass anymore? I know it used to be a thing but I think fresh plastic bottles probably cost less than even the collection and sorting costs for glass. I haven't seen any recycler ask for glass in ages.
>Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it.
They are just giving people what they want at a price they can pay. If you really want to minimize waste, the way to go is probably for people to make their own soda at home using flavor extracts. It's easy and probably less polluting to do this than anything else. But when you're not at home, you have to have drinks ready-made.
In Quebec you bring your glass bottles back for their deposit and at least for the beer bottles they are cleaned and reused many times.
Many bottles in the US still say they are subject to a deposit of like 5 cents, but only in certain states. I've never lived anywhere that had an active bottle return program for glass.
> barcodes highlighting allergens and other dangers
Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart already sell homeopathic sugar pills labeled as closely as legally possible to real medication, stored in the same sections, intermingled one box to the next on the same shelf. The lack of information about a product isn't a technology issue; it's a combination of proper information being expensive to produce and more expensive when it keeps you from buying a lower-production-cost alternative.
You see this in all kinds of markets. Say you want to buy a plant grow lamp; you want physical dimensions, power in, and power out. If you're a nerd or using a lot of them you might like the wavelength distribution (_and_ the units used to produce it), the weight, whether it has UV protection, .... That information is ommitted from most Amazon listings and the packaging from most big box stores. Why is it missing? I guarantee the problem isn't that they used a barcode instead of a QR code.
If you are of the opinion that there’s something that needs to be changed about this arrangement, your lawmaker is the one to contact.
Doing price lookups based on barcode-encoded identifier scanned in at the point of sale doesn’t change radically if the encoded format is a UPC or a QR code. We’re probably getting close to the point where most retailers now have POS equipment that can handle QR codes, and manufacturers can consider leaving UPC codes off of their packaging.
Outside of a point-of-sale context, you’ve always been able to look up other data based on the product identifier. Not sure how QR codes change that.
Stores discount these things as they approach the end of their shelf life, which generally means spending labor to individually tag items with a substitute barcode. But labor costs money, and clerks get busy, things get missed, food gets wasted, and margins get degraded.
Currently the barcode on something like a steak encodes the PLU and the weight. If it also encoded the pack date, then this discounting can take place automatically with no chance of missing anything.
A more readable size is a version 10, which can encode up to 174 bytes with maximum error correction and no compression. This is plenty if a certian predefined binary structure is encoded into it and a device knows how to decode it
The other option is unique id (same 16 bytes, plus maybe other claims like bottle size) plus assymetric signature, 64 bytes i think - for Ed25519. Should fit into 174 bytes just fine and can be verified without internet
They don't need an ID that won't collide with anything else in the universe, they need an ID that won't collide with other bottles.
If we estimate 2^37 bottles per year (137 billion) then a minimal tracking number is about 40 bits, a couple more at most.
What's the use case for a signature?
You can generate these trivially. If that bottle id is 100, next would be 101. With 128 bit numbers it's unlikely anyone ever guess an id without seeing it. Less bits - more collisions. Maybe some other number of bits will work
Regarding signature - offline verification, simple self-sustained checker can confirm that bottle is indeed valid one (can't count refills globally though)
But if the goal is effectively unguessable, 64 bit numbers would be fine. That's less than a one in a million chance of guessing an ID, so trying to guess is harder than just looking at some real bottles and copying their numbers.
> simple self-sustained checker can confirm that bottle is indeed valid one
Unless the number was copied.
can print fake cola codes for infinite refills :) and some other genuine cola buyer will be very angry because their mint-condition bottle already used up. Also, "one in a million" assuming this tech is only being used by this specific product. if anyone else is going to use the same schema for anything else, numbers will dry up much faster. bringing oats as valid cola bottle is funny. if you add prefix, it'll eat up these sweet sweet bytes
also, 1/million is not that much - you can spam online check api (and you need one with just IDs) to filter out existing ones. All in all 64-bit or so IDs have too many downsides to consider them useful, one simple misstep and the whole model is broken
> Unless the number was copied.
yep, also used up by different device
You misunderstood what kind of "refills" are being talked about here.
> Also, "one in a million" assuming this tech is only being used by this specific product. if anyone else is going to use the same schema for anything else, numbers will dry up much faster. bringing oats as valid cola bottle is funny. if you add prefix, it'll eat up these sweet sweet bytes
I completely disagree with how you're using numbers here. Whether a number is a valid coke ID has no relation to whether it's a valid oats ID.
The thing the ID is attached to already acts like a prefix, while costing 0 bits.
The only way this could possibly make a difference is if you're scanning through hundreds of thousands of other packages and checking if their numbers happen to be a valid coke ID so you can cut it out and stick it on a coke bottle, all to avoid printing it yourself. That sounds unlikely. In particular you still need to check every number, so you're basically using other packages as a very very slow RNG to save two cents of printing costs.
> also, 1/million is not that much - you can spam online check api (and you need one with just IDs) to filter out existing ones
Mass-spamming an API that has even the slightest of anti-spam measures is a pain in the ass, especially if you want more than a couple IDs. The threat of "just find one of the many billions of real bottles and copy the ID off it" is always there, so if technical attacks are orders of magnitude harder then they don't matter.
[0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/why-are-aldi-barcodes-so...
It doesn't seem like a url is serving the same purpose, unless you are thinking that the url itself is the unique handle (and it's not actually used for a request, it's just a unique identifier).