A street vendor in India uses a light powered by refurbished battery cells.
If you think your laptop battery needs to be thrown away after it dies, think again.
IBM Research India in Bangalore are working on a great idea with your batteries being a year’s worth of treasure for a house in the developing world.
According to David Talbot at Technology Review:
The IBM group, working with a hardware R&D firm called RadioStudio, tore open discarded laptop battery packaging and extracted individual storage units called cells, tested those individually to pick out the good ones, and recombined them to form refurbished battery packs. Then, after adding charging dongles as well as circuitry to prevent overheating, they gave them to five users in Bangalore who lived in slums or operated sidewalk carts.
Three months later, the users said the battery packs had worked well; the main request was for rat-resistant wires and brighter bulbs, says Mohit Jain, a research engineer with the group. A revised setup is now being tested.
Imagine if this were to be turned into a business – not only would people be working for a good cause, but the battery would be providing four hours of light a day for an entire year.
Sometimes just because it’s never been done before doesn’t mean it can’t. Think big!
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