QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/30/barcodes-could-be-superseded-by-a-more-powerful-alternative-by-the-end-of-2027

by veltas • 2 years ago

20 56 2 years ago

theguardian.com

veltas• 2 years ago

Coca-Cola has used the new generation of codes in parts of Latin America for refillable bottles, with the QR code allowing the counting of refills so that a requirement of 25 before recycling can be enforced.

More tracking!

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

My congratulations to all local entrepreneurs who are gearing up their printers to print "replacement" QR codes to put over the existing ones, once the 25-refill limit is reach.

arccy• 2 years ago

presumably the QR code is just an ID and the actual counting is done on a server, so there's not much room for "replacement" qr codes

crazygringo• 2 years ago

You've got it backwards -- it's a 25-refill minimum, not limit.

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.

dialup_sounds4• 2 years ago

That's not how any of this works. The bottler is reusing the bottle 25 times, not the end consumer.

dialup_sounds4• 2 years ago

After careful consideration I've decided that I'm more concerned with the waste and pollution caused by single-use plastics than I am the privacy rights of polyethylene bottles.

smallerfish• 2 years ago

First they came for the soda bottles...

DoingIsLearning4• 2 years ago

How is this not moving more responsability and work onto consumers rather than tackling the problem at the root.

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.

tokai• 2 years ago

Plastic bottle reuse has been done in other countries for half a century, without QR codes.

analog31• 2 years ago

How much data can the code store? I doubt it will contain all of that information, but rather, a URL. Like the other post said, more tracking!

Tomte• 2 years ago

Much more than the 1D barcode.

yonatan80702• 2 years ago

According to Wikipedia, the largest (version 40) QR code can hold up to 1852 bytes, though they are huge and difficult to scan.

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

out_of_protocol4• 2 years ago

GUID - 128-bit (16 bytes) code is enough to code unique id that can be stored in central database, that's smallest possible scenario, i think.

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

ptek• 2 years ago

I know "The Scene" has 1K demo section, this 1,852 bytes could be interesting. An extra 852 bytes :)

frankus• 2 years ago

One of the ideas I was toying with a few years ago was a machine-readable nutrition label, but self-contained rather than involving a database lookup (there just aren't that many bits of entropy in a nutrition facts table, so it's practical to just encode it in a reasonable-size 2D barcode).

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).

yonatan80702• 2 years ago

Things like "Vegan" can also just be a distinctly icon on the label, I've seen that many times on restaurant menus

cxr• 2 years ago

Better: keeping putting "vegan" and "contains nuts" on the label like every manufacturer already is, wherever they want it to be, and however they want it to appear, but mark it up appropriately, and make the file for the label design accessible by URL. This is the Web that Tim Berners-Lee actually wanted (browser makers' and Modern Web devs' insistence that the Web is really about App Store-like SPAs that can run in your browser notwithstanding).

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".

cr125rider• 2 years ago

Better yet: don’t mark things with what they don’t contain, only things they do. Gluten free, is dumb, contains gluten is much better. What it doesn’t contain is nearly infinite, what it does or might contain is a much smaller list.

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. To machine-read every item's nutrition label, you have to read every item, one at a time. So maybe I can find the food that doesn't contain nuts, but I still have to scan every food item first.

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.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

We have written language which can do all that with no technology at all.

turtles3• 2 years ago

Indeed, we also have technology that can read the written language. Seems like that would be the way to go, and you get to keep backwards compatibility with eyeballs

hansvm• 2 years ago

Some of this looks great, but some of those benefits are literally never going to materialize.

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.

insensible• 2 years ago

For a very long time now, homeopathic remedies have been regulated by specific US law, called HPUS, and are labeled accordingly. They’re actually required to include examples of what they treat even though many in the homeopathic community would rather it be labeled more generally.

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.

jt2190• 2 years ago

This is a confusing article.

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.

dialup_sounds4• 2 years ago

I can see this being used for discounting fresh foods to reduce waste. Not bulk produce, but packaged produce, meat, bread, prepared foods.

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.

layer8• 2 years ago

Aldi uses huge barcodes to speed up scanning [0]. I‘m not sure it would make sense to replace those with two-dimensional codes.

[0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/why-are-aldi-barcodes-so...

chrisandchris• 2 years ago

Also, if for whatever reason, you can always enter a barcode by hand if the text-line is still readable (so like manualsearching for an EAN) while this is impossible by a QR code (too mich data to enter by hand).

siwyd• 2 years ago

They speak of "QR-style" barcodes, but it's very unclear to me whether GS1 is actively pushing QR or DataMatrix as the preferred 2D barcode style. In medical devices and pharmaceuticals, both the 1D and 2D DataMatrix GS1 barcodes have been used extensively for quite some time so I would personally think DataMatrix is the way to go. I'm just a casual observer though. Is there anybody here that has more inside knowledge on what the game plan is?

dsamarin• 2 years ago

We need to decentralize barcodes by treating product lookups as a URL, with metadata as query parameters. This way GS1 can operate much differently.

RaftPeople• 2 years ago

But the barcode is primarily encoding a unique handle to the item for purposes of communication between parties and systems (e.g. the thing that I just scanned as I placed it in the shipping container is thing X not thing Y).

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).

theanonymousone• 2 years ago

Given the IPv6 case, I will handle this one with care.

QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'

Related Stories