A new battery binder—the glue that holds together a battery’s internal parts—could make lithium-ion batteries more environmentally friendly and easier to recycle without sacrificing performance.

By creating a binder that is fluorine-free and dissolves in water, engineers at the University of California San Diego showed that they can simplify both battery manufacturing and recycling by cutting down on toxic ingredients, energy use and waste. Batteries made with the new binder performed just as well as conventional lithium-ion batteries.

The advance, published Oct. 9 in Nature Communications, was a collaboration between the lab of Zheng Chen, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and John Muldoon at Toyota Research Institute of North America.