Five public schools in Casamassima, a city in Italy's Apulia region, are using a radio frequency identification solution to identify children as they arrive, and to automate the ordering and payment of each child's lunch. Since the system was taken live in fall 2013, the technology has reduced the amount of labor for school personnel, ensured that food isn't wasted due to over-ordering and enabled parents to make lunch payments online.

Hanjin Newport Co., a division of Hanjin Shipping, is using an ultrahigh-frequency RFID solution to help manage its 20 percent growth in traffic this year at its deep-water terminal in the city of Busan, South Korea.

For the past seven years, Carlo K. Nizam has been the head of Airbus Group's Value Chain Visibility and RFID program. He has led the effort to use radio frequency identification, as well as what the company refers to as "Intranet of Things" technologies, to track aircraft parts, logistics containers, tools, jigs, subassemblies and other critical assets.

When discarded computers and printers arrive at its facility, Sinctronics uses RFID readers to identify their component materials so they can be more quickly recycled and incorporated into new IT products.

Global retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) is expanding its use of EPC ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID technology at most of its stores, from 80 percent of its general merchandise toward a goal of tagging 100 percent of goods within the next two years.

For the past five years, the Pyhäsalmi mine in central Finland has been using passive high-frequency RFID tags to record when workers enter or leave a mine shaft. Since that time, says Kimmo Luukkonen, the mine's managing director, the technology has improved management's visibility into who is underground and when, and hence has increased its safety program's efficiency and accuracy. The company plans to expand that RFID solution to monitor who carries explosive detonators into the mine.