Most people empty the last drink from a glass bottle and toss it in the recycling bin, never thinking about it again. In 2017, a team of engineers at UC Riverside took one such bottle and turned it into battery material. UC Riverside's official research announcement explains that the team at UC Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering turned waste glass into anode material for lithium-ion batteries. The article says one bottle can create either hundreds of coin cells or three to five pouch cells. The batteries made from the glass bottle had a capacity of 1,420 mAh/g after 400 charge cycles, a figure reported in the underlying Scientific Reports study. For readers conscious of phone use and waste, those numbers are worth unpacking.
A landfill problem hiding in plain sight
Part of the reason this research matters comes down to sheer volume. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the United States produced 12.3 million tons of glass in 2018, 7.6 million tons of which were dumped into landfills in the same year, comprising 5.2 percent on average of all landfill inputs across the country. Glass does not biodegrade. It can persist for a very long time, so UC Riverside set out to find a new use for it.
