WASHINGTON — The Chesapeake Blue Crab has been a staple food source in Maryland dating back to the 1600s. But now, a group of engineers from the University of Maryland are using the otherwise trashed crab shells to make batteries.
When asked what the Bethesda Crab House does with bad crabs or shells, General Manager Yen Lee exclaims, “Right now all we do is just throw them in the trash."
And Bethesda Crab House isn't alone. Chucking dead crabs and shells in a can is a common practice among restaurants and distributors.
Yen Lee said in a whole summer, the restaurant typically tosses around 10,000 pounds of shells in the trash.
But those protective casings are proving to be a key ingredient when it comes to harnessing renewable energy. Crab shells can be processed into a material called chitosan, which is a critical component in zinc ion batteries.
"If we can use those materials, we not only solve the CO2 emission problem, but we also solve the problem of the waste," said Lin Xu, a postdoctoral associate in the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland.
Xu and a team of researchers have been studying the environmental benefits of using crab shells in batteries. Chitosan has been found to be biodegradable, which means it can break down naturally within five months compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries that can take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose.
“That's the reason why we try to really commercialize this technology and make it be in everybody's cellphones and electric vehicles and more,” Xu said.
It turns out the Maryland delicacy, which is easy for us to crack, also has remarkable strength when it comes to batteries.
"It has really very good mechanical strengths," Xu said. "You can stretch it, you can try to deform it, but you will not make it crack."
So how do you take a crab shell and get chitosan? Through a series of sodium hydroxide treatments.
Right now Xu and his colleagues are making small battery prototypes in the lab with plans to fabricate larger batteries to eventually store renewable energy for power plants.
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