Modern technology is exerting a similar effect on the way people view many electronic products. Yesterday’s exotic, highly prized electronic devices generally are treated with casual disregard by today’s users. "We live in a disposable society," observes Randi Altschul, inventor of the world’s first-and as yet unsuccessful-disposable mobile phone. (It’s made of paper.) "We want everything fast and short term."

In the past, high product price and relatively low repair costs encouraged people to attempt to extend the life of even fairly trivial devices. Today, with product prices and repair costs flipped, it’s often cheaper to toss away a device once it breaks or becomes outdated, rather than trying to repair or upgrade it. As a result, a staggering array of products, including RFID tags, displays, mobile phones, digital cameras and printers are all falling, or have already fallen, into the "use it and lose it" category.

With more disposable technologies flooding the mainstream, CIOs face a dilemma. On the one hand, low-priced throwaway gadgets save enterprises money by reducing or eliminating the costs of repair and maintenance. On the other hand, disposable technologies carry their own baggage, including significant security and environmental concerns. Balancing disposability’s risks with its benefits is one of the key challenges CIOs will face in the coming years.

Tracking Disposability

Products are disposable when they become so inexpensive that the buyer has little regard for their purchase price. This, in turn, leads to broader use. In the RFID sector, for example, falling tag prices encourage the tracking of ever less consequential items.

At the moment, tag prices are still high enough-around 20 cents each-to prevent item-level tracking of low-cost products such as groceries. Jeff Woods, a principal analyst at Gartner, believes that when tags hit the 5 cent level, "then [RFID] can turn into a consumable, disposable technology."

But RFID can already be considered a disposable technology when it comes to certain high-cost products, such as a plasma TV or a Prada handbag. People are another type of "high-value asset" that can be tracked by RFID. Precision Dynamics makes a wristband, incorporating Texas Instruments’ RFID chip technology, that can be worn by hospital patients, schoolchildren, and theme park and sporting event attendees.