only 10 of packing peanuts are recycled in the uschemical engineers at purdue university, us, have found that socalled packing &lsquopeanuts&rsquo can be recycled into materials for rechargeable batteries.only 10 of packing peanuts, traditionally made from polystyrene but increasingly from cornstarch, is recycled in the us, as it is not economical to do so. in landfill, they take up a lot of space and can leach harmful materials &ndash such as heavy metals, chlorides, phthalates and detergents &ndash into the soil. when purdue associate professor vilas pol was refitting his lab, he found that much of the equipment came surrounded by packing peanuts. rather than throwing them away, he and research associate vinodkumar etacheri decided to find a use for them.they realised that the peanuts could be turned into carbon microsheets for use as anodes in rechargeable lithium batteries. previously, researchers have used temperatures of over 2,000°c to turn other carbonbased materials into carbon microsheets. pol and etacheri, however, baked the packing peanuts at around 590°c, which is much lower. this lower temperature creates structures with a disordered, porous structure, rather than a neater, layered arrangement.etacheri explains that the disordered structure allows the carbon microsheets to store more lithium ions than the theoretical limit, giving the battery a higher capacity. the porous nature allows lithium ions to diffuse quickly in and out of the material, which means the batteries can charge much faster. in tests, the material outperformed conventional battery electrode materials, such as graphene, and has a higher storage capacity.pol says that the process is easily scalable and could be exploited commercially within two years.the research was presented at the 249th national meeting & exposition of the american chemical society acs. a video about the process is available on youtube. 
