
How Paper Batteries Charged by Bacteria Could Power the Internet of Things - rbanffy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/paper-battery-that-could-power-the-internet-of-things
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sidstling
Danish muniplacities are installing IoT devices in a long range of things,
from monitoring when a trash can is full, keeping track of parking, creating
rfid tours with bits of historic-info showing up in an app as you travel
around the city to monitoring high-pressure wells for leaks.

Most devices have batteries that last 5-10 years though, and often it’s the
device that needs to get changed, not the battery. Like the trash can IoT
devices, they’ll never actually outlive their battery. Even if a devices
manages to survive its battery, 10 years is a long time, so you’d probably
want to replace it regardless.

This is still a really cool article though, and it’d be silly for me to say
that we’d never use it, but battery life isn’t actually a problem for us.
Maybe it is in other places? And there is also the enviromental angle to
consider, especially in political organizations.

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hippich
Not trying to nitpick, but we live in our current house for 8 years. And when
we moved in we "inherited" city-provided trashcan, which was probably there
for another 8 years easily if not more. It is a plastic one. Why does trash
can need to be replaced every 5-10 years?

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maxxxxx
In LA they pick up trash with trucks and a mechanical arm. This seems pretty
hard on the trash cans. Mine tend to break in some way every 3-5 years.

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hippich
In my case it is picked up either by mechanical arm, or by a guy bringing it
to the end of the garbage truck and truck doing the rest (did not find why
they run different trucks each time) Seems to last just fine.

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patan22
_…To activate the battery, the researchers added water or saliva, both of
which revived the bacteria …_

 _…Choi says that his latest hybrid paper-polymer biobattery readily
decomposes in water…._

A new world of biological pollution awaits us.

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jillesvangurp
I think the general idea here is that these are biodegradable materials ....

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truculent
That doesn't mean it can't be a pollutant. To take a simple example,
fertilisers are biodegradable and yet run off + eutrophication is incredibly
ecologically damaging.

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jillesvangurp
Sure, but why would you assume it is? Also, you'd need a lot of this stuff to
do any damage even if it was that much of a pollutant.

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bookofjoe
2 words: contact lenses

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jillesvangurp
At less than a gram per lens, there's only so much damage those are going to
do. I looked it up, we're talking about 23 tons worth of lenses for the US. A
lot, but it pales in comparison to other stuff we do to the environment. Like
traditional batteries for example, which we're talking about replacing with
something bio degradable.

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wmnwmn
Guess what, we don't need an internet of things. It's not going to happen and
you can tell that because it's been hyped for a decade now and has not
produced any product that anyone buys.

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adrianN
While I don't really see the use case for private individuals, IoT technology
is very interesting on the factory floor. Tracking parts and getting sensor
data from all kinds of machines is quite useful.

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kwhitefoot
Why do you think that private individuals wouldn't also benefit from being
able to track things? I'm quite forgetful so being able to track my
possessions would be quite useful to me.

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rbanffy
I'd love if my charger would tell me it wants to go into the backpack before I
board the plane without it.

