The reusable plastic mugs contain a passive high-frequency tag enabling consumers to pay for beverages and earn discounts, as well as avoid the consumption of disposable paper cups and plastic lids.

23 June - In the interest of going green, customers at a handful of coffee houses are buying their beverages with reusable mugs known as Smugs (or Smart Mugs) with RFID chips embedded inside, thereby reducing not only the number of paper cups in landfills, but presumably the time they spend paying for drinks as well. The system was conceived and developed by Chris Hallberg when he was a coffee-drinking student at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, Wisc. He has since graduated, and now works in El Salvador developing nebulizers that can operate without electricity (nebulizers are used to transform liquid medication in a mist that can be inhaled into the lungs), thanks to funding from a research grant. Hallberg is also assisting the Ministry of Transportation in the city of San Salvador to develop an RFID-based prepaid transit card for city buses.

In 2008, while attending bioengineering classes, Hallberg envisioned an RFID-enabled coffee cup that customers could use to pay for beverages, by simply loading an account with funds and tapping the cup against a reader wired to a server containing data related to that account. He took the idea to several local coffee shops, eventually gaining the interest of Stone Creek Coffee. Hallberg began working with Stone Creek's owner, Eric Resch, to develop a solution that would succeed in a typical coffee shop.

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