Degradable battery ditches the metals

Abstract

The lithium-ion batteries that power small electronics are rarely recycled. These materials also use significant amounts of cobalt, which is in short supply and sometimes mined using unethical practices. Jodie Lutkenhaus , Karen Wooley , and coworkers at Texas A&M University have now built a battery that avoids these problems. Their metal-free battery uses an organic polypeptide backbone for its electrodes, which the scientists can degrade with acid into amino acids for potential reuse ( Nature 2021, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03399-1 ). The design is a step toward a circular battery life cycle, in which batteries could be degraded and rebuilt without entering the waste stream. This offers an improvement over batteries made from nondegradable organic polymers, another approach for eliminating metals from batteries. These organic polymer batteries would likely have the same fate as other plastics, Wooley says. “More than 90% of the plastics that could be recycled are not.” To