Organic Batteries for a More Sustainable Future

Cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential ingredients in today’s lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), but their continued use presents economic, ethical, and environmental challenges. Society must now begin to consider the implications of a LIB’s full life cycle, including the carbon footprint, the economic and environmental costs, and material access. These challenges motivate the case for degradable or recyclable batteries sourced from earth-abundant materials whose life cycle bears minimal impact on the environment. This presentation considers organic polymer-based batteries, which have the potential to address many of these issues. Redox-active polymers form the positive and negative electrodes, storing charge through a reversible redox mechanism. We demonstrate polypeptide radical batteries that degrade on command into amino acids and by-products as a first step toward circular organic batteries. Further, we show the recycling of redox-active polymer electrodes using a solvent-based approach. Polymer-air batteries are examined as high-capacity alternatives to metal-air batteries. The molecular mechanism for each case is investigated, revealing pathways forward for improving each polymer’s performance. Taken together, organic batteries offer the promise of a circular platform free of critical elements.