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Abstract

Sustainable sources of energy have been identified as a possible way out of today's oil-dependency and are being rapidly developed. In contrast, storage of energy to a large extent still relies on heavy metals in batteries. Especially when built from biomass-derived organics, organic batteries are promising alternatives for truly sustainable energy storage. First described in 2008, research on biomass-derived electrodes has been taken up by a multitude of researchers worldwide. Nowadays, in principle electrodes in batteries could be composed of all kinds of carbonized and non-carbonized biomass: On the one hand, all kinds of (waste) biomass may be carbonized and used in anodes of lithium or sodium ion batteries, cathodes in metal-sulfur or metal-oxygen batteries, or as conductive additive. On the other hand, a plethora of biomolecules like quinones, flavins, or carboxylates contain redox active groups that can be used as redox active component in electrodes with very little chemical modification. Biomass-based binders can replace toxic haloginated commercial binders enabling a truly sustainable future of energy storage devices. Besides the electrodes, also electrolytes and separators may be synthesized from biomass. Recent research progress in this rapidly emerging field is summarized with focus on potentially fully biowaste-derived batteries.