CES 2021: 'Clean Tech' Gadgets Dominate This Year's Show

Hundreds of thousands of attendees would congregate in Las Vegas every January to crowd together, cough into the air, and unwittingly smear their excretions across touchscreens, rotating TVs, and robot bartenders.“We talk about CES as a petri dish,” says Carolina Milanesi, a technology analyst and founder of the market research firm The Heart of Tech. With the world still gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic, the first-ever online CES has become a place for companies to show off new tech meant to make the world more sanitary.Targus' UVC LED disinfectant light will be available this March.So far we’ve seen dozens of cleaning gadgets, from antimicrobial backpacks to truly insane UV-light-spewing, air-purifying robots. (Scrubbing a dirty touchscreen won’t go a long way toward killing an airborne virus.) Still, the pandemic has brought heightened awareness of just how filthy the world can be, and marketers are taking advantage of it.“There's a lot of money to be made in this space, and most of that money is probably being made by less than scrupulous actors in the field,” says Jeffrey Siegel, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto who researches ventilation and indoor air quality. However, in order for it to be truly effective, you have to run the light for five minutes every hour.“I do get nervous seeing some tech that has claims of being antiviral, like some UV disinfection technology, which can be really wonderful but requires significant validation and safety considerations,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, who I reached via email.