Before the end of the year, employees at Ubiquitous Energy, a company in Redwood City, Calif, will gather in a window-lined conference room to stare toward the future. That’s because their new glass windows will offer more than an amazing view of the North California landscape. They will also be able to power the company’s lights, computers and air conditioners.

Several years in the making, Ubiquitous’ energy-producing glass is a remarkable technological achievement. Its power lies in the layers of organic polymers (聚合物) between sheets of glass. As light enters the window,the flow of electrons between the polymer layers creates an electric current, which is then collected by tiny wires in the glass.

“It’s sort of like a transparent computer display run in reverse (反过来),” says Veeral Hardev, director of business development at Ubiquitous Energy. “Instead of electricity being shuttled to different points in a display to light them up, light is producing electricity to be shuttled out of different points in the window.”

Right now the windows produce about a third as much electricity from a given amount of sunlight as the typical solar cells used in roof panels (板). These windows, about half as transparent as ordinary glass, don’t work as well as transparent ones. Hardev says the company is likely to improve the transparency significantly. As for the lower output of electricity, he notes that windows can cover a much greater surface area than a roof, so numerous windows will produce a surprisingly larger amount of electricity than the production from a rooftop full of higher-efficiency solar panels. “You could do both.” says Hardev. “But you’ll get more from the windows. The biggest challenge, he adds, is increasing the windows from less than two square feet currently to about 50 square feet.”

Researchers are trying to explore creative ways to reduce e-waste. Now one team has invented a water-activated battery (水激活电池) made of paper and other sustainable (可持续的) materials.

Some e-waste is relatively large: old phones and air conditioners, for instance. Other e-waste is more unnoticeable, such as batteries. It’s these small batteries that are big problems. Nobody really pays attention to where they end up. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology are working to address this problem. They invented a water-activated paper battery using environmentally friendly materials that could eventually replace the more harmful batteries common in low-power devices.

A traditional battery is made of plastic, metal or other harmful materials. The paper battery works the same as a traditional battery. It has a positively charged (带电的) side, a negatively charged side, and a conductive material (传导材料) between the two. In the new battery, the positively and negatively charged sides are inks printed onto the front and back of a piece of paper. That paper is filled with salt, which dissolves (溶解) when the paper is wet. When the paper is dry, the battery is off. Once the paper is wet, the battery activates within 20 seconds. The new battery’s operating performance worsens as the paper dries. When the scientists rewet the paper during testing, the battery begins to work again and lasts an hour before beginning to dry out again.

Although the researchers showed that their battery could power an alarm clock, it is unlikely to replace standard batteries now. It is hard to predict a time line for producing such batteries in a large number, but that future may not be so far off.

“This really starts with the development of sustainable materials,” Nyström, the lead author, explains, “From there, I think we are able to create something that is quite useful.”

Plastics remain one of the most-used materials for making many things. Things made of plastics can be very strong and last a long time. Plastics are also much lighter than metal and can easily be formed into different shapes. Plastics can take hundreds of years to break down on their own. And very few kinds are highly recyclable.

A team of researchers working at the US Department of Energy says it has created a kind of plastic that could lead to products that are 100 percent recyclable. It recently reported the discovery in a study in the journal Nature Chemistry.

The researchers say the new material is a plastic polymer (聚合物) called polydiketoenamine, or PDK. The team reports the material can be broken down in parts at the molecular (分子的) level. It can then be built up again to form plastics of different shapes, textures and colors.

The researchers say this process can be repeated over and over again-without the plastic material losing any performance or quality.

“Most plastics were never made to be recycled,” lead researcher Peter Christensen said in a statement. “But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective.”

Many plastics have different chemicals added to them to make them more useful and powerful. The problem is that these chemicals attach to the monomers (单体), which remain in plastics even after the material gets processed at a recycling plant. The research team reported that, with the newly discovered PDK material, the monomers could be recovered and separated from any chemical additives.

Next, the researchers plan to develop PDK plastics with a wide range of thermal and mechanical properties. These plastics could be used for many kinds of cloth, as well as things such as 3D printed materials and foams. In addition, the team is trying to include plant-based matcrials in the process.