The new binder is built from remarkably humble ingredients: polyacrylic acid and carboxymethyl cellulose, two inexpensive and widely available polymers, crosslinked by citric acid, a common food-grade molecule. What makes this combination powerful is not any single component but the architecture of the network they form together. When the binder is cured, the citric acid creates covalent crosslinks between the polymer chains, while the abundant carboxyl groups along the polyacrylic acid backbone engage in hydrogen bonding with one another and form ionic interactions with the active electrode particles and the metal current collectors. The result is a three-dimensional network that integrates hydrogen, covalent, and ionic bonding simultaneously, a design that solves a long-standing problem in sustainable electrode engineering.

Previous attempts to replace PVDF have often turned to bio-derived binders that can be processed in water, an attractive proposition because water eliminates the need for toxic solvents and dramatically reduces processing costs. However, these bio-based alternatives typically depend on hydrogen bonding alone to hold electrodes together. Hydrogen bonds are individually weak and can break down under the mechanical stresses of battery operation or the harsh electrochemical conditions inside a cell, particularly at high voltages where oxidative degradation becomes a threat. The new crosslinked network overcomes this limitation by layering multiple bonding modes on top of one another. The covalent crosslinks provide permanent structural integrity, the hydrogen bonds offer energy dissipation and flexibility, and the ionic interactions anchor the binder firmly to both active particles and current collectors, delivering strong adhesion along with good oxidative stability and thermal stability.

To test the concept, the researchers fabricated positive electrodes using lithium iron phosphate, a cathode chemistry prized for its safety and longevity in electric vehicles and stationary storage. Electrodes made with the fluorine-free binder delivered an initial capacity comparable to control electrodes made with conventional PVDF, meaning the new binder sacrifices nothing in terms of how much energy the battery can store on first use. More strikingly, the fluorine-free electrodes exhibited better cycle stability than their PVDF counterparts, retaining their capacity more effectively over repeated charge and discharge cycles. This improvement likely stems from the robust multi-bond network, which better accommodates the volume changes and mechanical fatigue that electrodes experience during cycling, keeping active material particles connected to the conductive pathways that carry electrons in and out.

The versatility of the binder chemistry proved to be another key strength. The researchers showed that the same fluorine-free formulation applies to a wide range of both positive and negative electrode materials, suggesting that it is not a niche solution tailored to a single chemistry but a general-purpose platform that could be adopted across the battery industry. This breadth matters enormously for commercialization, because battery manufacturers produce many different electrode chemistries for different applications, and a binder that only worked for one material would offer limited value. A single binder system that works across the portfolio of lithium-ion technologies could simplify manufacturing lines and accelerate adoption.

Perhaps the most consequential finding of the study concerns what happens at the end of a battery’s life. Direct recycling, in which spent electrode materials are recovered and rejuvenated rather than broken down into their elemental constituents, is widely regarded as the most energy-efficient and environmentally friendly recycling pathway. Yet PVDF has been a persistent obstacle to direct recycling because its fluorinated structure generates harmful fluorinated residues during processing and complicates the separation of active materials from the binder matrix. The new fluorine-free binder dissolves this problem. Because it is water-processable and free of fluorine, the researchers were able to demonstrate full recovery of spent positive and negative electrodes, restoring the recovered materials to the same level of performance as pristine ones without generating any fluorinated waste.

The implications of this full-recovery demonstration extend beyond the laboratory. When the team performed a life-cycle analysis comparing batteries made and recycled with the new binder against those based on PVDF, the fluorine-free system showed significant reductions in both energy cost and emissions. This analysis captures the entire journey of the materials, from initial manufacturing through use and into recycling, and it reveals that the environmental benefits compound at every stage. Manufacturing in water instead of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone saves energy and eliminates toxic solvent handling. Recycling without fluorinated residues avoids hazardous waste streams. And because the recovered electrode materials perform identically to pristine ones, they can re-enter the production loop indefinitely, closing the circle that conventional battery manufacturing leaves stubbornly open.

The research also benefited from sophisticated analytical capabilities. The team used beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility operated by Brookhaven National Laboratory, to probe the structure and behavior of their binder system at the molecular level. Such advanced characterization is essential for understanding exactly how the hydrogen, covalent, and ionic bonds distribute themselves within the electrode and how they respond to the stresses of battery operation, knowledge that guides further optimization of the formulation. The work was supported in part by the ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, reflecting the strong automotive industry interest in sustainable battery technologies, and the researchers have filed a patent application related to the technology, a signal that they see a viable path toward commercial deployment.

What makes this advance resonate beyond the technical community is the elegant simplicity of the underlying idea. Rather than inventing exotic new materials, the researchers combined three inexpensive, well-understood substances in a way that exploits the full spectrum of intermolecular interactions. Polyacrylic acid and carboxymethyl cellulose are already produced at industrial scale for applications ranging from diapers to food thickeners, and citric acid is one of the most abundant organic acids in the world. This means the supply chains and processing knowledge needed to manufacture the binder at scale largely already exist, removing one of the most common barriers that laboratory discoveries face on the road to real-world impact.

As the world electrifies transportation and grids, the volume of lithium-ion batteries reaching end of life is projected to grow into the millions of tonnes per year, making recycling infrastructure not just an environmental nicety but an economic and strategic necessity. Binders have long been treated as a minor, almost invisible component of battery design, yet this study demonstrates that they sit at the very heart of the sustainability challenge, dictating how electrodes are made, how they perform, and how easily their valuable contents can be reclaimed. By replacing a fluorinated polymer and a toxic solvent with a water-based, fully recoverable alternative that actually improves cycle life, the researchers have shown that circularity and performance need not be trade-offs. If the technology scales as hoped, the batteries of the future may be born in water, live longer, and return intact to the factory floor, again and again.

Subject of Research: Fluorine-free polymer binders for sustainable manufacturing and direct recycling of lithium-ion battery electrodes

Article Title: Fluorine-free polymer binder enables circular manufacturing and recycling of lithium-ion batteries

Article References: Lin, J., Mu, A., Tang, W., Li, F., Zhu, Y., Li, M., Yeerella, R. H., Potts, C., Cai, S., Mu, L., Muldoon, J., & Chen, Z. (2026). Fluorine-free polymer binder enables circular manufacturing and recycling of lithium-ion batteries. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78215-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78215-3

Keywords: lithium-ion batteries, polymer binder, PVDF, recycling, circular economy, water processing, polyacrylic acid, carboxymethyl cellulose, citric acid crosslinking, life-cycle analysis, lithium iron phosphate, sustainability

The opportunities side of the ledger is genuinely impressive. Digitalization—the process of converting physically collected information into computer-readable language—can overcome sustainability barriers that have frustrated policymakers for decades. Satellites and remote sensors now monitor ecosystem health in real time, giving conservationists an unprecedented window into deforestation, glacial retreat, and ocean warming. Artificial intelligence applications can improve efficiencies in agriculture and transport, reducing carbon and water footprints by optimizing irrigation schedules, logistics routes, and energy grids. Blockchain technologies can decentralize and expand access to energy and finance sectors, enabling peer-to-peer renewable energy trading and financial inclusion for communities excluded from traditional banking. Online platforms create new opportunities to access education, healthcare, and jobs, decoupling opportunity from geography. Taken together, these applications suggest that digital infrastructure could serve as the nervous system of a globally coordinated sustainability effort, detecting problems faster and allocating resources more precisely than any previous generation of tools allowed.

But the risks are equally concrete, and the authors document them with striking specificity. Data centers that train and deploy complex AI applications are highly energy- and water-intensive. One frequently cited example: a data center cluster in Iowa supporting the training of ChatGPT-4 used 6 percent of the district’s water during its last training month—a figure that surprises even technologically literate audiences, since the water footprint of computing is largely hidden from public view. Beyond operational resource use, digitalization drives demand for rare earth metals, whose extraction is linked to significant social and environmental harms, from toxic tailings to labor exploitation. The sector also generates staggering quantities of electronic waste: 62 billion kilograms in 2022 alone, according to the Global E-waste Monitor. Perhaps most insidiously, lower production costs may lead to higher production and consumption, a rebound effect that can entirely offset the efficiency gains that made the technology attractive in the first place. A cheaper, more efficient system that scales tenfold can consume more resources in absolute terms than the inefficient one it replaced.

The social risks compound the environmental ones. The digital divide—the gap between those with access to digital infrastructure and those without—continues to limit access to emerging online opportunities in education and employment for marginalized communities, meaning that digitalization can widen inequality even as it creates new forms of opportunity. Algorithmic bias and misinformation are also well documented, with biased training data producing discriminatory outcomes in hiring, lending, and policing, while generative systems accelerate the spread of false information at scale. The authors emphasize that the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies, their cross-boundary impacts, and their varying interactions under different socio-economic and political settings make it extremely challenging to map and measure the full spectrum of environmental and social consequences. A single AI model’s footprint spans mines on one continent, manufacturing on another, data centers on a third, and disposal sites on a fourth. Society, they argue, must proceed with caution and carefully manage the adoption, usage, and intended purpose of these technologies rather than assuming that innovation alone will bend the curve toward sustainability.

What distinguishes this piece from a general warning is its actionable structure. Drawing on their experience as convenors and knowledge creators at the sustainability-digital-society interface, and as co-champions of the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES), the authors direct a set of priority recommendations at three influential stakeholder groups: sustainability science practitioners, including scientists, researchers, and community groups; the digital innovation sector, including technology developers, industries, and suppliers; and policy makers with regulatory influence. The premise is that no single group can manage digitalization’s footprint alone—collaboration across sectors, with each actor adopting priority actions within their own communities, is the mechanism by which sustainable digital practice becomes the norm rather than the exception.

For the research community, the authors argue that sustainability science practice can no longer be separate from digitalization, and they propose three concrete efforts to align the two. First, learning around digital tools, skills, risks, and opportunities should be integrated across sustainability education, so that established environmental studies curricula train future practitioners—including educators—to critically analyze and use digital technologies in a safe, sustainable, and effective way. Second, they call for building a sustainable digitalization community of practice, bringing together actors from diverse knowledge systems—industry, research, Indigenous, and policy—at the intersection of environmental sustainability and digital innovation. Such communities, they note, play a crucial role in solution co-design, knowledge sharing, and building the trust needed to overcome barriers to action. Third, they propose establishing a formal scientific process, analogous to existing climate assessment bodies, to systematically map the direct and indirect pathways through which digital technologies impact the environment. Such a process could identify data gaps, set standards for digital sustainability, identify key stakeholders and assign accountability, and establish science-based policies to govern digital technologies.

The digital innovation sector, meanwhile, is asked to accelerate efforts to monitor and mitigate environmental impacts across the entire technology lifecycle, with a particular emphasis on providing the data needed to measure and manage those impacts. The authors recommend that manufacturers of computational hardware report the emissions and resources extracted in the assembly and transportation of equipment, and that computer scientists report the resources used to train and deploy various AI applications. These life cycle analyses would provide a clearer understanding of how digital technologies affect the environment across supply chains and reveal opportunities to reduce impact—addressing precisely the opacity that currently obscures figures like the Iowa water consumption data. They also call on innovators to follow green digital infrastructure standards, adopting environmental requirements for the development and purchasing of digital technologies, such as minimum use of recycled materials, a requirement for data centers powered by renewable energy, and recycling of electronic waste.

Policy makers receive the third set of recommendations, centered on ensuring that digital solutions are designed and deployed with both people and the planet in mind. The authors urge decision makers to prioritize funding—including public digital infrastructure procurement—toward digital solutions that demonstrate measurable benefit to both people and the planet, rather than subsidizing growth for its own sake. They call for a strengthened regulatory landscape, with requirements at national, regional, and international levels to increase transparency on the environmental footprints of energy-intensive digital technologies such as large language models, build institutional capacity to recycle and reuse e-waste, and leverage low-carbon or renewable energy sources to power data centers. Finally, they recommend increasing public awareness by educating constituents on the environmental impacts of digital technologies—around e-waste, energy use, water consumption, and other issues—so that demand-side pressure reinforces rather than undermines sustainability goals.

The authors argue that governance momentum is already building, and they point to a rapidly maturing institutional landscape. The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence by a major regulator. The International Telecommunications Union offers guidance on assessing the environmental impact of the information and communication technology sector. The United Nations Global Digital Compact, adopted by world leaders at the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024, establishes shared principles for an open, free, and secure digital future. Globally recognized standards, such as ISO 42001 for the responsible development and use of AI systems, could be expanded to include environmental considerations. Yet the evidence also shows why targeted strategies remain essential: a recent analysis across European countries found a strong link between the digital economy and digital society, but this correlation did not strongly connect to improved environmental sustainability. In other words, digital development does not automatically become sustainable development—capacity building and awareness raising among technology developers, science funders, and the sustainability research community remain crucial steps toward that goal.

The stakes of getting this right could hardly be higher. Sustainable digitalization, the authors conclude, has the transformative potential to create a thriving future for people and the planet, but only if the environmental and social costs of the digital transition are governed with the same seriousness as its benefits are celebrated. The piece arrives at a moment when AI investment is surging globally and data center construction is accelerating, making the window for embedding sustainability requirements into infrastructure, curricula, and regulation both urgent and narrow. Whether the digital age becomes an era of planetary repair or one of accelerated extraction will depend, the authors suggest, on whether scientists, innovators, and policy makers act collaboratively—and quickly—on the priority actions they have laid out.

Subject of Research: Sustainable digitalization: governing the environmental and social impacts of digital technologies to advance global sustainability goals

Article Title: Striving for a sustainable planet in the digital age: Recommendations and priority actions

Article References: Kumarasinghe, N., Gleeson, E., & Ventimiglia, A. (2026). Striving for a sustainable planet in the digital age: Recommendations and priority actions. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(5), e0000249. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000249

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000249

Keywords: sustainable digitalization, artificial intelligence, data centers, e-waste, digital divide, climate change, sustainability governance, life cycle analysis, CODES, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, Global Digital Compact, environmental policy

The research, a collaboration between the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, was led by Wyss Founding Core Faculty member Pamela Silver and Associate Faculty member Michael Springer. First author and chemical engineer Neil Dalvie, who spearheaded the project as a postdoctoral fellow in Silver’s laboratory, and his colleagues genetically engineered Alteromonas macleodii, a bacterium widespread in marine environments, to produce far greater quantities of molecules called siderophores. These compounds are the bacterial world’s iron-scavenging tools, and it turns out they are also remarkably effective at stripping iron from the surfaces of silicate minerals. In customized bioreactors flushed with a continuous flow of seawater, the engineered microbe accelerated the weathering of the silicate mineral olivine by 2.6-fold, measurably increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide drawn into the water. The findings were published in Nature Biotechnology.

To understand why bacteria can speed up rock dissolution, it helps to look closely at what actually happens on a weathering mineral surface. When olivine and similar silicates dissolve, they release magnesium, iron, and silicate, and the chemistry of that dissolution simultaneously traps atmospheric carbon dioxide in the surrounding water as bicarbonate. But the released iron presents a problem: exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere, it is not soluble and instead precipitates as rust, coating the mineral surface and slowing the entire weathering process to a crawl. Bacteria that produce siderophores can capture, solubilize, and import that oxidized iron to satisfy their own nutritional needs. In doing so, they effectively de-rust the mineral surface, exposing fresh reactive material to seawater and allowing dissolution to continue. It is a subtle biological intervention with outsized geochemical consequences, and it is precisely this natural mechanism the Harvard team set out to amplify.

The first obstacle the researchers encountered was regulatory rather than chemical. Using custom bioreactors to dissect when natural bacteria produce siderophores, they discovered that even a small amount of iron-containing mineral completely shut down siderophore production. Wild bacteria, it seems, are thrifty: once they have accumulated enough iron to support growth, they stop investing energy in making the scavenging molecules altogether. That built-in thriftiness is a disaster for anyone hoping to harness siderophores for industrial-scale carbon removal, because the whole point is to have the bacteria continuously attack mineral surfaces regardless of how much iron is already available. Once wild bacteria have enough iron to grow, they stop making siderophores completely, Dalvie explained. To enable enhanced weathering at scale, the team engineered A. macleodii to always produce siderophores, essentially decoupling production from environmental iron levels and converting a self-regulating survival mechanism into a relentless industrial workhorse.

Engineering the microbes took roughly a month, but the far harder task was proving that the modification actually translated into faster weathering and greater carbon uptake. For that validation, Dalvie teamed up with Amogh Jalihal, a postdoctoral fellow in Springer’s group at the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School. The two researchers concluded that the most rigorous measurement would be made at steady state, with seawater and bacteria continuously flowing over the minerals rather than sitting in batch cultures where conditions drift unpredictably. Fortunately, Springer’s group had recently acquired an entire room of eVOLVER bioreactors, small-scale devices originally designed by Ahmad Khalil, another Wyss Associate Faculty member and professor at Harvard University. The eVOLVER platform, with its modular, automated control of growth conditions, proved ideal for the small-scale studies that would establish whether the engineered strain genuinely outperformed its wild-type ancestor on real rock.

Those early experiments showed promise, and the team escalated to pilot-scale bioreactors loaded with several kilograms of green olivine sand submerged under gallons of raw seawater drawn from Boston Harbor. Working at pilot scale forced the researchers to confront the practical questions that separate laboratory demonstrations from deployable technology: how often cells needed to be added, how they should be fed, and how the system could be kept running continuously. Eventually the team was able to measure actual uptake of 0.5 grams of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the reactors each day, a modest absolute quantity but a compelling proof of principle for a process that could, in principle, be replicated across enormous basins. The result demonstrated that engineered bacteria could survive and function in unprocessed seawater, on unrefined mineral feedstock, under conditions far closer to the open environment than a sterile laboratory flask.

Quantifying the climate value of any proposed carbon removal technology requires more than measuring uptake in a reactor, however. To that end, Dalvie and Jalihal collaborated with Abigail Fitzgibbon, a doctoral student working with Steven Davis, Professor of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, whose group develops models to quantify the carbon emissions of industrial and agricultural processes and their effects on air quality and human wellbeing. Together the teams carried out a Life Cycle Analysis, an accounting framework that captures all carbon emitted or sequestered by the entire system over time, including its living, geological, and chemical components. The collaboration enabled the researchers to calculate the net carbon balance of their system precisely and to identify which process parameters would be decisive in making the technology efficient at industrial scale. Such analyses are essential for distinguishing genuinely negative-emission technologies from those that merely shuffle carbon from one reservoir to another.

The path from pilot reactor to planetary impact still runs through substantial scale-up work. The team notes that further studies are needed to identify economically viable sources of feedstocks and silicate minerals, since the cost and carbon footprint of mining, crushing, and transporting rock could easily erode the climate benefit if chosen poorly. Intriguingly, the researchers are also investigating whether valuable metals could be extracted from the silicate minerals alongside carbon sequestration, potentially creating a co-product revenue stream that improves the economics of deployment. Dalvie recently received a fellowship from the Burroughs Wellcome Career Awards at the Scientific Interface program, which will fund continued work on microbial siderophore production and mineral processing, providing momentum for the next phase of development.

Springer’s vision for deployment is strikingly pragmatic. The most straightforward way to create environmental impact, he suggested, would be to grow the bacterial strains with adequate food sources in large basins resembling those found at sewage treatment plants, continuously pumping unprocessed seawater in and releasing alkaline seawater back into the ocean, where the bound carbon would be completely harmless and buffered away. Such a design would piggyback on existing industrial infrastructure and established engineering practices, avoiding the need to invent novel containment systems from scratch. Because the carbon ends up as bicarbonate dissolved in seawater, the approach avoids many of the permanence and monitoring concerns that complicate other carbon removal strategies, and the alkalinity released to the ocean may itself help counteract acidification, though the team’s published claims rest on the weathering and carbon uptake results rather than on ocean alkalinity benefits.

Silver framed the work as an embodiment of biologically inspired engineering, demonstrating how synthetic biology can enhance natural climate-regulating processes with potentially positive planetary impact. She and her colleagues believe the strategy is easily applicable and low-risk, and could be implemented in many locations with real-world decarbonization outcomes. Whether engineered bacteria can weather rock fast enough to matter for the global carbon balance remains to be proven at scale, and the jump from half a gram of carbon dioxide per day to gigatonne-relevant removal is enormous. But the study, supported by the Wyss Institute Director’s Fund, the Synthetic Biology Hive at Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s Climate and Sustainability Translational Fund, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, a Garden Grant from the Homeworld Collective, and a Schmidt Science Fellowship, establishes a credible new entry in the growing portfolio of ocean-based carbon removal approaches. Other authors on the study include Jan-Tobias Böhnke, Mohammed Hijaz, and Quincey Justman. If the numbers scale as hoped, the humble chemistry of rusting iron and dissolving stone, accelerated by reprogrammed microbes, could become one of the more elegant tools in humanity’s decarbonization arsenal.

Subject of Research: Synthetic biology enhancement of marine bacterial siderophore production to accelerate silicate rock weathering for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal

Article Title: Pulling carbon into seawater using engineered bacteria

Article References: Pulling carbon into seawater using engineered bacteria. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: carbon removal, rock weathering, synthetic biology, siderophores, Alteromonas macleodii, olivine, ocean alkalinity, enhanced weathering, climate change, bioreactors, life cycle analysis, marine bacteria