Samsung Eco Remote
A remote that never requires you to change the batteries—what kind of utopian vision of the future is this? Apparently it’s Samsung’s, given that the company took CES 2022 as an opportunity to introduce its new-and-improved Eco Remote, which is made from recycled materials and utilizes the power emitted by the radio waves that come from wifi routers in order to self-sufficiently charge.
Samsung has been trumpeting its desire to switch to more sustainable materials since at least 2019, when the company announced that it would abandon most of its plastic packaging in favor of more sustainable options. The Eco Remote builds on that commitment, in that it ditches the need for a lithium-ion battery and works by siphoning off the radio frequency signals emitted by your wifi router that would have otherwise gone to waste. Like the previous iteration of the Eco Remote, the updated version is also capable of charging via solar power, but the newly-added RF harvesting capabilities should give it an extra boost. According to Samsung, the new remotes—which will ship out automatically with all of Samsung’s 2022 QLED 4K and 8K TVs—could eventually prevent 99 million AAA batteries from being dumped in landfills over the next seven years. Not bad, for something small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. —Brianna Provenzano
