Toxics Alert: Researchers upcycle plastic waste into battery anodes

A team of U.S. researchers has presented a new approach to plastic waste treatment. A paper published by the American Chemical Society showed how researchers from Indiana’s Purdue University extracted pure carbon from plastic waste and turned it into anode material for lithium-ion batteries which powered a toy truck. The team claims that the method can be scaled easily. If so, plastic waste could find a hungry offtaker for its upcycled products in the PV industry, as collocated storage is becoming commonplace. Also, the uptake in electric vehicles could create a sizable market for such anodes. The method produced battery anodes that perform competitively with commercially available products, the researchers claim. Hundreds of millions of tones of plastic are produced worldwide each year with most of it – more than 85% – making its way to landfill or the ocean. Landfilling plastic releases toxic chemicals into the environment and much of it still ends up in the seas. Plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050.

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Researchers upcycle plastic waste into battery anodes

Source: pv magazine india, Date: , 2019