Over the next several years, the European Union will require entire product categories to carry structured, verifiable digital product passports containing detailed information about materials, carbon footprint, durability, repairability, and supply chain sourcing. Without a compliant Digital Product Passport, affected products cannot legally be sold in the EU. For manufacturers,
Billions of single-use containers — cups, trays, bottles, food boxes — are produced, used once, and discarded every year. Regulators across Europe have said this must change and are accelerating the move away from single-use materials toward reusable and recyclable systems. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) requires
Every day, RAIN RFID tags are being read billions of times across the world — in hospitals, warehouses, airports, factories, retail stores, and sports stadiums. Most of the time, nobody notices. That is exactly the point. The technology works quietly in the background, giving organisations real-time visibility into where their
By Aileen Ryan, President & CEO, RAIN Alliance In recognition of the International Day of Women and Girls in Tech I began my career as an engineer. Like many women in technology, I learned early how much perseverance, curiosity, and confidence it can take to find your voice in technical
A single-use cup is used for minutes but takes years to break down, and the vast majority end up in landfill or incineration, not recycling. Regulation is now forcing the reuse issue: the EU's Single-Use Plastics (SUP) directive is already in force, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is
Over 100 billion items of clothing are sold every year. More than 70% of them end up in landfill or incineration. Not because brands don't care, and not because the recycling infrastructure doesn't exist — but because nobody knows where the products are, what they're made of, or how to
A retailer's inventory system tracks thousands of items with near-perfect accuracy. A hospital confirms a medication is genuine before administering it. A consumer scans a designer handbag with their smartphone to verify it's authentic. These scenarios work because RAIN RFID does its job reliably — connecting physical items to digital
For years, RAIN RFID has operated as quiet infrastructure — powering inventory management, supply chain visibility, and operational efficiency across industries. Its impact is profound but largely invisible to the people benefiting from it. That is changing. As item-level transparency initiatives advance and RAIN readers are integrated into smartphones, the
Quality has always mattered in RAIN RFID. But for much of the industry’s history, it has been difficult to talk about quality in a way that is both precise and widely understood. Today, the RAIN Alliance’s Manufacturing Quality Certification Guideline and Manufacturing Quality Guideline Use Case Scenarios help change that,
From pilot schemes to permanent business models — the technology making reuse as easy as single-use. The world has a single-use problem. We know this. But we are moving past the era of awareness and firmly into the era of infrastructure, and the infrastructure that is quietly making reuse work