Whenever you order a package online and it is sent over, sometimes the sender stuffs packing peanuts in them to help cushion any shock that the package might experience during its delivery. However getting rid of them can be very troublesome as these packing peanuts are extremely light and will fly all over the place, leaving little flakes all over the floor.

Now before you advocate to do away with these packing peanuts for good, it seems that they might have found a higher purpose in life, which is to double up as a way to help charge batteries faster. This is thanks to scientists at the Purdue University who have managed to come up with a heating process that converts the peanuts into anodes made from carbon.

The end result not only helps to prevent wastage of the peanuts, but it helps recycle them into technology that helps to charge batteries faster, not to mention the resulting carbon anodes are only a tenth as thick as commercially available ones meaning that the amount of electrical resistance produced is less.

However before you expect to see these packing peanut chargers in shops in the future, there are still some kinks left to work out. For example the charging cycles are only good for 300 charges, which if you were to charge on a daily basis means that your battery would be dead by the end of the year, but we suppose it’s a start, not to mention it’s cheap, simple, and relatively easy to replicate on a large scale.

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