Waste glass could hold key to high-performance battery materials

Despite long-established recycling schemes, many millions of glass bottles still end up in landfill every year, representing a significant waste of resources. Mechanical and electrical engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have now discovered that glass from waste can be turned into a material for lithium ion battery electrodes using a low-cost chemical process. Moreover, batteries using these electrodes significantly outperform conventional cells with graphite electrodes, they claim.

Mechanical engineer Cengiz Ozkan and electrical engineer Mihri Ozkan have previously led efforts to make battery electrodes from other environmentally-friendly materials, including mushrooms and fossil-rich earth. Their latest effort, detailed in a paper in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, draws on previous research that found that nanostructured silicon anodes can store up to 10 times as much energy in a lithium-ion cell than conventional graphite anodes; the silicon is able to absorb large amounts of lithium and the nanostructured form prevents the material from swelling when this happens, protecting the mechanical integrity of the battery.