RFID Labels for Package Printing

Standard and design implications

In 1999, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came up with the idea of establishing a numbering system large enough to cope with thousands of trillions of items that might be identified uniquely by RFID one day. As a reference, five to 10 trillion items are bar-coded every year in the world but not with unique numbers. The bar-coding systems from what is now called GS1, are typically used generically, so few numbers are needed. For example, no one can currently trace a given can of soda from its bar code, but low-cost RFID makes that objective realistic, with huge implications for supply chain efficiency, safety, and security. EPCglobal was created within GS1 to devise and administer this numbering system and associated systems, with supply chains and particularly pallet and case tagging of consumer goods as the first priority.