However it seems that over in Colorado, researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder have managed to figure out a way to take that wastage and turn it into low-cost lithium-ion battery electrodes. This discovery was published in the journal of Applied Materials and Interfaces which details the process.
As it stands, it is possible to create battery electrodes from biomass, however the process is said to be costly and limited to the availability of the raw materials required to do so. In this instance since the wastage is part of the process of brewing a barrel of beer, it’s not as if companies would have to go out of their way to get the raw materials, plus it does seem like a relatively green process.
Graduate student and lead author Tyler Higgins and his co-authors have filed for a patent for the process and have created a company called Emergy to help commercialize it and to scale up production.