Expertise Smartphones | Smartwatches | Tablets | Telecom industry | Mobile semiconductors | Mobile gaming
When you buy a new controller or keyboard, do you know how that impacts the environment? Companies do, but it usually takes them months to figure it out. Gaming peripherals maker Razer has introduced its own new AI tool, Gaiadex, that apparently cuts this time down to mere minutes.
The new tool breaks down all the components used in a product to a mineral level and uses AI to analyze and predict its environmental impact in under 5 minutes, Razer says. It's only being shared with companies that partner with Razer right now, but it could provide meaningful insights for an industry that releases products full of plastics, metals and rare earth elements that gamers and tech users buy every day. For consumers and companies increasingly concerned with climate change, it's more transparency that could lead to more sustainable practices.
This builds on Razer's previous efforts to add material "nutrition labels" on the boxes of its lineup of products. But Gaiadex is aimed at manufacturers that undergo costly research, called life cycle assessments, which can take up to five months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Razer said in a press release. The company also claims its tool is far more accurate than a traditional LCA with less margin for error.
Razer says it has spent the past two to three years working on integrating life cycle assessments into its workflows and training its AI models, and then started using Gaiadex to learn more about its product line. This opened the company's eyes to its use of minerals and their complex impact on the environment, leading it not only to change its product strategies but also protest things like the growing global demand for deep sea mining of precious minerals, said Razer global head of global sustainability Kenneth Ng. Razer wants other companies to make the same discoveries.
"We want to really streamline every brand's work so that we can all provide a very objective way to measure the impact of our products -- not just gaming products, but the entire industry as a whole to restart reporting and give consumers the full transparency that they require," Ng said.
Gaiadex's analysis was built to live up to standards established by the International Standardisation Organisation -- specifically, Type III environmental product declarations that are held up to third-party verification. In other words, it's considered more accurate than those made by manufacturers.
In 5 minutes, a company can get a 60-page Gaiadex report, which brands can take to get an independent third-party verification to slap an eco-friendly sticker on their product boxes on store shelves if requirements are met. And for its part, Razer wants more partners using its AI tech tool so that the tech product industry's understanding of material use measures up to these higher standards, which results in better integrity of the data collected, Ng said.
"We want to make sure [the data] is absolute and vary as little deviation as possible to the consumer," Ng said.
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Take a standard Razer computer mouse as an example, Ng said, which is made of components like batteries and silicon boards containing up to dozens of parts, which themselves can be broken down into materials consisting of chemicals and elements. A PCB silicon board weighing a tenth of a pound could have hundredths of a gram of gold, copper and zinc. Ultimately, that mouse's electronic bill of ingredients, as the list breakdown is called, could have around 3,000 different lines.
Small companies might have a hard time getting such a material breakdown on their own, so Gaiadex estimates it for them with a margin of error of plus or minus 3% -- down from the plus or minus 30% of a traditional LCA, Razer says. Then the company's AI tool can compare that material checklist with those of similar products in the industry and flag to the manufacturer if they're out of step with the competition.
The point is transparency for how, at scale, making all these products affects the world.
"Our impact to the environment is not just global warming, which is definitely the most popular thing going on right now, but we also want to talk about eco toxicity. Is [a product] going to pollute the environment?" Ng said.
Gaiadex estimates how a product affects the environment across several so-called impact categories that include climate change, but also whether it's harmful to human health or contributes to ozone depletion and acidification, produces ionizing radiation and what materials and water was used to create it.
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Razer is unveiling Gaiadex to the world as it's introducing the AI tool at the United Nations' COP 29 environmental conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its goal at the conference is partly to encourage the tech accessories industry to adopt the same environmental declaration standards and partly to recruit partners. An important part of making an AI model that can estimate a life cycle assessment is training it on product data.
Razer trained Gaiadex on its own lineup, but has worked with partner companies to feed their products' bills of materials into the AI model so that its analysis is industry-specific, sensitive and reliable. One of Razer's biggest partners is GE Healthcare, which they're helping to do calculations to manage healthcare equipment.
Razer wants to help smaller companies adopt those international standards Gaiadex uses to start their own LCAs, which can be put on product labels for consumers to understand the environmental impacts of what they're buying. Maybe someday, people can easily tell the cost of the accessories they use as much as the impact of what they eat.
"Nowadays, when you talk about carbohydrates, you roughly have the sense of how it's going to affect your body, but we don't have the same measurement in our head for all these different [environmental] impact categories," Ng said.
And what Razer found is that gamers actually want this information. In Reddit threads and conversations on X (formerly Twitter), they're asking for more specific insights on the products they use. Consumers are very enlightened these days, he said, researching across publications to understand more -- and there's no fooling them.
For now, Razer is letting only partner companies use Gaiadex, but there's a plan to make it more publicly and readily available by the second quarter of 2025. The more companies abide by international standards to understand environmental impacts, the quicker the tech products industry is to avoid mistakes of the past, Ng believes.
"It took us generations to realize that we need to pay extra attention to the environment. Let's not do the same mistake we've done before. Let's take a holistic view on not just the carbon footprint but the entire spectrum of impact that our products are doing to the environment," he said.
