IBM ThinkPad Laptop. Image: wikimedia.org.

In a throw-away culture, more than 50 million laptop batteries are discarded every year. Trash could hold treasure, because 70% of these cells have enough power to light an LED bulb for four hours each day — for a year. Science continues to develop new energy sources ranging from improved hydroelectricity to atomic energy, solar and beyond. But using what we have now is also important. In India, 400 million people struggle without reliable electricity. IBM’s Smarter Energy Group and RadioStudio are testing the laptop battery program, harnessing the power of failure to create success.

Vikas Chandan, IBM Research India. “A Lighting Solution using Discarded Laptop Batteries.” http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mjain/DEV-UrJar-2014-PPT.pdf

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.