Tofu Brine For Batteries Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, Guangdong have developed a new form of battery that is more eco-friendly and longer lasting than lithium ion batteries, and it can run on tofu brine. This water-based (also called aqueous) battery is neither acidic, alkaline, nor flammable. Lithium-ion batteries are notoriously highly flammable if damaged and can experience thermal runaway. They are also very hazardous to the environment in terms of waste handling. "The full cells are environmentally benign and nontoxic and can be directly discarded to environments according to various standards." the research abstract states. “Compared with current aqueous battery systems our system delivers exceptional long-term cycling stability and environmental friendliness under neutral conditions,” the research team said in a paper published February 2026 in Nature Communications. Standard batteries often fail after a few hundred or a few thousand charges, but this new version remained stable for 120,000 charge cycles. To put that in perspective, if you charged your phone once a day with this type of battery, it would theoretically last for over 300 years. “At over a hundred thousand cycles, this could mean a single water-based battery could last at least a decade or so. For applications like grid storage (solar farms, wind balancing), that’s extremely valuable.” the report went on to say. The scientists replaced traditional acids and alkalis with neutral salts of magnesium and calcium to create the electrolyte. These are the same minerals used as brine in tofu production. Keeping this liquid at a neutral pH of 7.0 prevents the type of corrosive reactions that can destroy a battery from the inside out. To complete the battery design, they replaced the negative electrode, which is often made of metal based materials, with a special material they engineered from covalent organic polymers (COPs). They made three of these structures and selected one named Hex TADD COP. It is built with electron-donating chemical links that make it more conductive. The researchers paired this with a positive electrode made of Prussian blue analog, a material commonly used as a blue pigment in paints. The battery held a significant amount of power for its weight. It reached an energy capacity of 112.8 mAh/g, which is a high score for an aqueous organic battery. Aqueous batteries can be potentially cheap to produce as they rely on ingredients that are less rare in addition to being less hazardous. Currently, China alone controls half of the global lithium market, and is rapidly increasing its stake. In 2024, more than eight in ten battery cells on the planet were made in China. North American demand will reach 250,000 tons of Lithium Carbonate Equivalent by next year. If this new technology can perform reliably outside of lab conditions, is energy-dense enough to complete, and can prove cheap at an industrial scale, the world of energy storage may go through a large shift for renewable grid buffering and rural electrification projects.