First thing we had was the LED lamp replacing the Fluorescent lamps, then EV cars and the possibility of Hydrogen cars making an impact on the market within the next 10 years, what next? Well how about the small things that are often overlooked? The indispensable lithium and alkaline battery could be growing up.

The issue with batteries as we know them in the domestic market is that the majority of them are thrown away into landfill which can cause issues of fire safety when they eventually explode and set fire to combustible products nearby in the recycling centres.

As well as many batteries simply thrown away in the domestic waste collections. The components of batteries rely on materials that are difficult to gather and more expensive to recycle. The invaluable products to manufacture a battery are difficult and expensive to extract from the earth. The end line could be a greener future and less alkaline and lithium batteries in landfill, less mining for the lithium and chemical mixing for both style of battery, leading to a more sustainable for a greener planet.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have announced they have built a mechanical sensor made purely of silicone that requires no external power and could help prevent battery waste by replacing the battery as we know it. The sensor works by utilising the vibrations in sound waves. In essence, the sound waves in your voice or a particular noise being generated will cause the sensor to vibrate, this in turn generates an electrical pulse that switches on your device of choice, whether this is a daily part of our lives from a smart speaker, cochlear implants or mobile phones to the specialist market of safety projects, such as monitoring naturally occurring things such as earthquakes, naturally escaping gas, down to listening for changes in the infrastructure of concrete buildings, a recent UK issue.

The possibilities could quite literally be endless, but would it take off? This would no doubt be down to the savings that could be made across the world producing and recycling batteries, but also would there be enough profit for the manufacture of such devices to make it feasible or would it mean the end of the battery market? The end line would no doubt be a greener future and less chemical waste to process if it was proved to be adaptable.

The development of the sensor is described in a new paper, ‘In-Sensor Passive Speech Classification with Phononic Metamaterials’, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.