KICKING THE LITHIUM HABIT

Lithium batteries aren’t the only possible way to power the green economy. Other options exist, including the sodium-ion battery. The advantage of sodium is that it’s chemically similar to lithium and is vastly more common. “Sodium is the sixth most abundant element on Earth,” James Quinn, CEO of British company Faradion, which supplies residential batteries in Australia, told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “You harvest it – you don’t mine it so much.” And, unlike zinc, another possible alternative, it’s only three times heavier than lithium. (Zinc is nearly 10 times heavier.)that said, most of the talk about sodium-ion batteries is just that: talk. It doesn’t currently perform as efficiently as lithium (though researchers in China are working on improving that), hence the focus on this elusive element.