Wood Sustainable batteries from wood waste

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A research team at the University of Jena, Germany, is pioneering the development of materials from lignin waste, a byproduct of the wood industry. These innovative materials are intended for use in the creation and recycling of sustainable batteries

The biopolymer lignin is present in large amounts in trees. It ensures that the wood of the trees remains stable. When this wood is processed into paper, for example, only the cellulose content of the wood is of interest. "In the pulp industry, around 50 million tons of lignin are produced worldwide every year. The majority of it is simply burned," says Prof. Dr. Martin Oschatz from the University of Jena. But lignin is far too valuable for that, says the professor of materials chemistry for energy applications. "Like cellulose and other biopolymers, it consists of hydrocarbon building blocks that can be used much more sensibly in chemistry."

From waste product to valuable material

That's exactly what Oschatz and an interdisciplinary research team from the Center for Energy and Environmental Chemistry (CEEC Jena), based at the University, now aim to do. Their "LignUp" consortium aims to upgrade lignin from a waste product to a valuable material. The project will be funded by the Carl-Zeiss-Foundation over the next six years as part of the "CZS Breakthroughs" program with just under five million euros.

Battery materials based on lignin

The researchers want to use lignin as a starting material for functional materials. "Batteries usually still contain critical metals, such as lithium, cobalt or manganese, whose extraction is connected with high costs and their resources are limited," says Oschatz. He and the "LignUp" team therefore want to look for new battery materials that can be made based on lignin and no longer require these metals.

Similarly, new types of filter materials can be synthesized from lignin, which can selectively separate metals from aqueous solutions. This would allow the recovery of critical metals in sustainable battery recycling processes or the environmentally friendly extraction in water-based ore processing. "We are linking industrial bioeconomy with energy technology across industries for the first time. Due to its versatile chemical structure, lignin is very well suited as a starting material for such new functional materials," says environmental chemist Prof. Dr. Michael Stelter, who leads the "LignUp" team together with Martin Oschatz. In addition, lignin is abundantly available in stable quality as a local raw material and is hence very well suited for large-scale industrial use, Stelter continues. The new project will also mark the launch of a new long-term focus on bioeconomy and energy materials at CEEC Jena.

Lignin as a basis for electrodes in energy storage

Carbon active materials derived from lignin could, for example, replace critical metals as electrode material in storage capacitors and sodium batteries. Such and other sustainable energy storage systems, such as metal-free redox-flow batteries, have been a research focus of CEEC Jena for some time, from which the core team of the "LignUp" project is also recruited. External researchers from the Thuringian Innovation Center for Recyclables (ThIWERT) in Nordhausen and the University of Bayreuth (both Germany) are also contributing their expertise.

Lignin-based functional materials for metal enrichment

The second pillar of the project is about developing new sources for critical metals. "Today, attempts are already being made to separate interesting metals from seawater or special mining waters through membranes or adsorption materials. In the future, water-based recycling processes for metals will also be added, such as from battery recycling. Therefore, we want to build up a material library and develop synthesis pathways that allow us to tailor new functional materials from lignin components that are better suited for extracting metals from water," says Martin Oschatz.