Sustainability and Barcodes
Sustainability is a huge buzzword. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sustainability means:
“…of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.”
Are Barcodes involved in Sustainability?
Yes! Barcodes are important in the following areas:
- Waste reduction: barcodes manage inventories with minute-by-minute accuracy, which can help eliminate over-production and excess inventory.
- Enhance resource management: matching production to demand helps to optimize energy consumption in producing, packaging, storing and transporting the product.
- Efficiency: barcodes enable rapid, nearly error-free automatic identification and data capture with great efficiency. This directly impacts productivity.
- Barcodes make consumers more aware, but pointing them to product ingredients, recipes, nutritional data, carbon footprint, sustainable sourcing and other environmental impacts.
- Recycling: consumers equate the barcode with the product, but it can also identify the package and whether—and how—it can be recycled.
Barcode Quality
Barcodes play an important role in sustainability because they provide access to important information. But only if the the barcode works.
Barcode quality involves to critical aspects:
- print quality: the barcode must be legible to the scanner, just as handwriting must be legible to the reader. The barcode must comply with the applicable ISO print quality standard.
- data structure: the encoded information in the barcode must comply with the applicable industry standard.
Are Barcodes sustainable?
Ironically, no—not yet anyway. A UPC assigned to a specific product cannot be assigned to a different product. The data bank of assigned product numbers has no methodology for retiring and reusing numbers. However, QR Codes can be sustainable. When a QR Code points the user to a url, the information at that url can change but the QR Code itself does not. For example, consider a restaurant’s menu. A user scans the restaurant’s QR Code on Monday and gets the Monday specials. A user scans the same QR Code on Saturday and gets the Saturday specials. Same QR Code, a different landing page. That’s sustainability.
The key to sustainability is knowledge. Knowledge is power. Barcodes are cheap, portable memory. They are a key tool in achieving and maintaining sustainability.
John helps companies resolve current barcode problems and avoid future barcode problems to stabilize and secure their supply chain and strengthen their trading partner relationships.
