RFID in Japan

In 2005, Japanese consumer electronics makers together established so-called Consumer Electronics RFID Consortium. Their aim is to develop usage models and international standards of RFID-based product life cycle management for consumer electronics devices.

@IT has this recent story on the consortium. One of the consortium's major goals is to improve the process of recycling. For example, refrigerators, which may or may not contain ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbon. By RFID tagging and tracking information about each individual refrigerator, one may easily figure out the right recycling method for it.

In this recycling scenario, however, RFID tags are not removed after purchase. Therefore, there would be much larger privacy concerns than supply-chain or storefront RFID scenarios. I'd think consumers may want to remove and/or kill the tags after purchase, and voluntarily reattach and/or reactivate the tags at the time of disposal.

In sum, privacy-aware recycling would be cool.