Packing peanuts are the worst. While the small foam devices are key to protecting whatever you're shipping, they're annoying to store and even more annoying to move around when you need access to whatever came in the mail. On top of that, what do you do with your packing peanuts after you've received your package? Most of the time, the peanuts ends up in the landfill.
One group of researchers may have found an alternative purpose for packing peanuts. During the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Vinodkumar Etacheri presented his idea for how we could use those packing peanuts in rechargeable batteries. According to Etacheri, only 10 percent of packing peanuts are recycled, and the rest are put in landfills. This leads to the slow decay of a number of artificial products that could harm the environment.
Etacheri believes that turning the packing peanuts into nanoparticles and microsheets would be an easy and effective way to keep them out of the landfills. Those nanoparticles and microsheets would then be used to create anodes in rechargeable lithium ion batteries.
But how effective are the nodes? Etacheri's team reports that its "anode works so well that it outperforms commercial ones, with a storage capacity higher than graphite, a typical anode material."
"They both have disordered, porous structures" Etacheri explains. "Their disordered crystal structure lets them store more lithium ions than the theoretical limit, and their porous microstructure lets the lithium ions quickly diffuse into the microsheets and creates more surface area for electrochemical interactions."
Etacheri also hopes his group's new, scalable process for turning packing peanuts into carbon microsheets and nanoparticles will be ready for commercial use within two years.
