J.L. Lutkenhaus
Texas A&M University,
United States
Keywords: polymers, batteries, electrochemistry, energy
Summary:
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 how these polymer electrodes can be degraded on command or else recycled, offering the promise of a circular platform free of critical elements.