Monday, November 27, 2006

Liquid Borders?

Wavebreak Media/Thinkstock
Shipping goods from one country to another has always been a paper-intensive process. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, every container that crosses international borders generates 30 different documents. That adds up to roughly five billion documents a year.

But the EU, in partnership with IBM and the Free University of Amsterdam, plans to do away with all that paper, and instead have imported goods counted, monitored and evaluated for tax automatically, without producing a single sheet.

Sound unbelievable? Read more here (immediate download of PDF file): A pilot between the EU and IBM could introduce paperless shipping.

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