An environmentally friendly battery made of coffee grounds on Wednesday won first prize in an annual innovative invention competition.
The battery, which ranked first in the innovative information and technology category, was created by a team of Chung Yuan Christian University students.
The competition was this year for the first time held jointly by Chung Yuan, Taichung’s Providence University and National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology.
The team came up with the idea of reusing coffee grounds after seeing the prevalence of coffee drinkers on campus, student Tsai Hsing-yu (蔡幸諭) said.
The team searched for statistics and found that Taiwanese annually consumed a total of more than 2.8 billion cups of coffee, Tsai said.
“We used coffee grounds as the source material to create electrodes for lithium batteries,” Tsai added.
The price of button cell lithium batteries on the market are NT$20 to NT$25, Tsai said, adding that their design reduced overhead down to less than NT$20 per battery.
The team’s instructor, Liu Wei-jen (劉偉仁), said the low production cost and eco-friendly nature of the concept increased its viability as a start-up business.
Meanwhile, students from the university’s department of bio-engineering developed a “lifting platform” that lifts pots from rice cookers.
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