An artificial intelligence system was developed by University of Washington researchers that estimates the environmental impact of making different electronic devices.
Using AI agents, this system goes through publicly available data to determine life cycle assessments of electronics. While human experts on sustainability teams can take days or months to manually gather information for these assessments, this system takes only a minute to run and is similarly accurate as a human.
The hope with automated life cycle assessments is freeing up time in companies’ workflows, shifting focus to reducing carbon footprints of the products themselves as a result.