A new safe, non-toxic supercap Lessons learned from the creation of a sustainable electronics component

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The electronics industry has a problem with its use of toxic substances and forever chemicals, and with its huge contribution to the mountains of electronic waste dumped in landfill sites. The pollution problem is bad for the industry’s reputation. It’s bad for the bottom line too: society is losing patience, and is increasingly legislating to curb the industry’s use of some materials, and to increase the cost of using others. 

In the past, the industry’s approach has too often been to defer the implementation of solutions by reducing harms rather than by eliminating them. But this is not a good look. When a smoker consults a medical practitioner about their health, the advice is not to reduce cigarette consumption – it is to stop smoking altogether. Likewise, the electronics industry’s goal should not be to reduce the environmental harm caused by the use of pollutants such as heavy metals and PFAS, it should be to eliminate the harm entirely. The example of Ligna Energy’s development of a safe, recyclable supercapacitor shows how this can be done.

Storing up environmental dangers

The problem of the incorporation of harmful chemicals in a product’s composition is particularly acute in the energy storage sector of the electronics industry. Batteries are commonly made with dangerous chemicals including lithium, manganese and cobalt. Aside from the effect of these chemicals when released into the environment on disposal, even their extraction as raw materials from the earth is often damaging, especially when mining takes place in regions of the world that experience armed conflict. And it is hard to overstate the scale of the problem of e-waste: according to the European Commission, 244,000 tonnes of portable batteries were sold in the European Union in 2022. In the same year, only 111,000 tonnes of used portable batteries were collected for recycling.

In response, governments worldwide are imposing increasingly stringent regulations on the makers of products that contain a battery. For example, The European Union’s latest Batteries Regulation 2023/1542 is aimed at ensuring that, ‘in the future, batteries have a low carbon footprint, use minimal harmful substances, need less raw materials from non-EU countries, and are collected, reused and recycled to a high degree in Europe’, according to the European Commission. In 2023, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rules governing the recycling and management of lithium batteries at their end of life. Given the environmental harms associated with batteries, and the costs involved in compliance with regulation, it is not surprising that product manufacturers are turning to energy harvesting as a green alternative power source, most often using an on-device photovoltaic cell to generate electricity. This is bringing the green credentials of supercapacitors into the spotlight, since energy harvesting systems require a form of energy storage, and a battery is the least green option. Supercapacitors might appear at first glance environmentally friendlier, as they typically contain no cobalt, although some hybrid supercaps contain lithium electrodes. But traditional supercaps have other pollutants hidden inside their case, including PFAS. So manufacturers of products with an autonomous, wire-free power supply cannot achieve true sustainability just by implementing energy harvesting: use of a traditional supercap might cause less harm than a battery, but it definitely does not eliminate the harm.

A new safe, non-toxic supercapacitor

It was this absence of a green option for energy storage which led Ligna Energy to create a completely safe, non-toxic supercap. Ligna’s S-Power supercaps are based on bio-materials, including active carbon electrodes derived from coconut husks, and a paper separator made from a material derived from forestry products. The S-Power products contain no toxic or harmful chemicals – no heavy metals and no PFAS. They are completely safe on disposal, and – unlike batteries or traditional supercaps – are easily recyclable by standard methods such as shredding and washing, or by recovery through incineration.

So what is the big difference between Ligna Energy’s approach, and the wider electronics industry’s continued tolerance of the use of toxic ingredient materials? We believe that it starts with our ethos, which underpins our business practices. Ligna Energy’s mission is to provide green and safe energy storage solutions which drive the development of the Internet of Things industry in a more sustainable direction. This mission is being realised through the development of the S-Power products, and the innovations in high-volume production which make the technology’s commercialisation possible. And underlying this practical goal, Ligna has followed two important principles of operation: An end-to-end green design philosophy and a commitment to original research to discover and deploy new non-toxic materials where necessary

The green design philosophy is expressed in a commitment to sustainability in every aspect of a Ligna product: not only the use of non-toxic and bio-based materials, but also innovations which reduce the carbon footprint of the product – just 6g CO₂e per unit for the
 1.2F S-Power 2S – as well as active partnerships with energy harvesting product manufacturers to make it easier for OEMs to replace batteries with PV cells or other forms of harvesting.

The other important aspect of Ligna’s approach is the commitment to discovering new, safe alternative materials. To create a completely non-toxic supercap, Ligna Energy could not simply specify a set of known components and assemble them in accordance with existing product ‘recipes’: it had to perform scientific research to test and validate new, safe materials, and then develop specialised production methods for assembling them in a supercap with precise, repeatable characteristics. The combination of a unique manufacturing set-up, a flat form factor, and validated material innovations form the core of Ligna Energy’s distinctive appeal: the marriage of sustainability and cost effectiveness. In other words, the S-Power products are the result of a deliberate, purposeful research effort aimed at creating a truly sustainable and safe alternative to existing supercap products that were neither sustainable nor safe. This, then, is how the electronics industry can pursue a path to the elimination of harmful chemicals, and not just a reduction in their use, or mitigation of the effects of their use: through an adherence to the principle of causing zero harm, and a commitment to the research and development required to create new alternatives to dangerous and unsafe materials in use today.