Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty
Traditional lithium-ion batteries dominate the commercial market today, but they often contain components that aren’t environmentally sustainable. And if you’ve ever owned a smartphone, you know that the rechargeable lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries that power these devices lose their capacity to store a charge over time, and have a low but worrisome risk of exploding.
Now, a team of engineers has designed biodegradable battery components made from—wait for it—crab shells! The new battery, outlined in a new paper published Thursday in the journal Matter, uses zinc ions rather than lithium, and the crab shell compound stabilizes the battery and improves its efficiency more than other zinc-ion alternatives in development. The University of Maryland and University of Houston researchers who led the work hope their crabby battery can add an extra layer of sustainability to renewable energy sources and pave the way to a fully green energy infrastructure.
“Rechargeable aqueous [zinc] batteries have a strong potential to fulfill the needs of large-scale storage for renewable energies, for example wind and solar power,” study author and University of Maryland materials engineer Liangbing Hu told The Daily Beast in an email. Now that the kinks have been worked out, he believes the use of these batteries on a large scale is “very promising.”