Battery Parts Made Out of Packing Peanuts in the Possible Future

Your new batteries could be made out of packing peanuts soon. Researchers from Purdue University have been developing a way to take those old packing peanuts in your shipments and turn them into parts of rechargeable batteries. Only ten percent of the U.S. supply of packing materials are recycled, leaving much of it in a landfill. The Purdue team is instead turning the fluffy foam into carbon microsheets and nanoparticles to use in rechargeable batteries with a new process - baking the peanuts at 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, which will give the materials a 15 percent higher electrical storage capacity than microsheets made at higher temperatures. The modified peanuts were then tested as anodes in rechargeable lithium ion batteries and seemed to work better than some of the commercial tech already out there (usually made of graphite materials).