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Mar. 20, 2012—Customers of Honeywell Safety Products, a division of consumer products company Honeywell are field-testing the firm’s new RFID-enabled safety gear tracking and management solution, known as Enabled Safety Products (ESP). The system is designed to enhance safety for equipment users, by enabling them to collect and store every item’s inspections records, as well as details regarding where and how each piece of equipment is being used, and by whom. By reading passive EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tags attached to equipment, a user can know, for example, at which site that equipment is located, as well as its condition and the employee assigned to it.

By utilizing the ESP system, a safety equipment user—such as a construction, oil and gas, or utility company—can maintain an electronic record of the history of its equipment, and thereby improve safety by ensuring that no asset misses inspection or is assigned to the wrong individual, says John Roth, Honeywell Safety Products’ senior product marketing manager. “It provides a safer work environment.”

Honeywell is now attaching tags to many of the safety products that it manufactures, including fall-protection equipment and eyewash cartridges. Users can also track their older Honeywell products, or those produced by other manufacturers, Roth says, by simply attaching an RFID tag and then entering that tag’s unique ID number into a secure, centralized, Web-based hosted database.

Most businesses that use safety equipment, such as construction or utility companies, generally document their equipment, and its inspections, on paper, and manually input those records into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The ESP system, however, is designed to automate that process, by storing data linked to a unique ID number on an item’s tag.

When Honeywell Safety Products manufactures an item to be tagged, such as a safety harness, the tag is attached at the point of manufacture. At its factory, its staff can then interrogate the tag using an RFID reader, linking the ID number to the product’s date of manufacture, serial number and description. Enabled Safety Products can then allow the customer to use that information to manage the product’s lifecycle. In this way, not only can a customer better manage equipment safety on a work site, but in the event of an audit, that user can then show an electronic record of the equipment’s manufacturing and inspection histories.

Once a company purchases the product—which typically occurs through a distributor—that customer can opt to enroll in the ESP system for an annual fee, based on the number of items to be tracked. To enroll, a user would visit the ESP Web site, select the login prompt and set up an account. The customer would employ a handheld mobile reader, or a tethered reader that can be supplied by Honeywell—the make and model would vary—as well as a PC or a laptop, in order to read the tag’s unique ID and press the “register” prompt. Honeywell Safety Products has designed the enrollment process so that it can be completed within five minutes, the company reports. Because Honeywell Safety Products commissioned the tag at the point of a product’s manufacture, the user will automatically see the item’s history, such as its manufacturing date and description, on that user’s Web-based account, or on a Wi-Fi- or cellular-enabled handheld reader, upon reading the tag.

The Chancellor has unsettled renewable energy investors by unequivocally backing a central role for gas in Britain’s energy mix, in a Budget that also held out the hope of scrapping one of the country’s most contentious green taxes.

Gas is “cheap, has much less carbon than coal and will be the largest single source of our electricity in the coming years”, said Mr Osborne, who also unveiled £3bn of tax allowances to boost North Sea oil and gas investment.

The development of technology to extract the shale gas found in many countries, and that was once hard to reach, has prompted a debate about whether this will encourage more investment in fossil fuel for years to come and make it harder to curb CO2 emissions.

“I am concerned about the focus that the Budget took on fossil fuels,” said Mark Kenber of The Climate Group, an international non-profit organisation. “In 2010 David Cameron pledged to become the ‘greenest government ever’ but with announcements like this it looks doubtful.”

Still, the tone of Mr Osborne’s speech differed notably from some of the comments he made about environmental costs in November’s autumn statement, when he said “we are not going to save the planet by shutting down our steel mills”.

Instead, he remarked: “Renewable energy will play a crucial part in Britain’s energy mix – but I will always be alert to the costs we are asking families and businesses to bear. Environmentally sustainable has to be fiscally sustainable too.”

Gaynor Hartnell, head of the Renewable Energy Association, welcomed the “noticeably more positive tone”, but added that the government’s own advisers had found that volatile gas prices, not renewable energy costs, were responsible for recent soaring electricity bills.

Industry groups were quick to welcome Mr Osborne’s announcement that he would review – and possibly abolish – the Carbon Reduction Commitment, a controversial scheme to cut corporate greenhouse gas emissions that was launched by the previous Labour government.

The measure is “cumbersome, bureaucratic and imposes unnecessary cost on business”, said Mr Osborne, promising that if he could not find savings in administrative costs for business, “I will bring forward proposals this autumn to replace the revenues with an alternative environmental tax”.

The scheme requires businesses that use a lot of electricity but are not covered by the European Union’s emissions trading system – such as banks and supermarkets – to report their emissions, and start paying for them from this year.

Some of the thousands of companies affected say it could cost them as much as £3m a year, said Jayne Harrold, an environmental tax specialist at PwC, the consultancy, “so the simplification George Osborne is talking about will be hugely welcome”.

The EEF manufacturers group applauded the move, saying the CRC scheme was a “doomed tax” that provided no guarantee of carbon reductions.

It was less enthusiastic about a separate – and expected – move in the Budget to raise the top-up rate for the carbon price floor that Mr Osborne launched last year, which ensures UK businesses pay a minimum price for emissions. However, it was pleased to hear the Chancellor confirm the government would ease the impact of the floor on operators of combined heat and power plants, which are more environmentally friendly than conventional energy systems.