From chip packets to battery pack: Yale Climate Fellows build sustainable battery pack

A collaboration that started as a joke during the Yale Emerging Climate Leaders Fellowship orientation week in New Haven ended with a working prototype in Paris.

When Joey Ocon and Anish Malpani met during the opening week of the Yale Climate Fellows program, neither expected to leave with a manufacturing partnership.

"We thought of joking around about doing something as part of the fellowship project," Joey says. "We brainstormed what the current needs and offerings of both of our startups were, and eventually we pinned down on something. To create a sodium ion battery pack housed in a plastic enclosure made from recycled material."

The two companies fit together neatly. Joey's startup Nascent Batteries in the Philippines develops sodium ion batteries for a market still dominated by lead acid. Anish's company in India, Without, turns waste that nobody else can recycle into usable material.

"We process unrecyclable plastic waste," Anish says. "Think chips packets, chocolate wrappers, mixed textiles. The worst of the worst stuff. We have patented technology that extracts materials from it and converts it into high quality products."

"It was a very cut and dry collaboration," he adds. "They need material for their enclosure. If they can get sustainable material, that's great."

What followed was a few months of calls across two continents. The teams designed the enclosure together, sent samples to India, and built a mold for manufacturing.

"Now we have enclosures in the Philippines and we're building packs so we can deploy them in the field," Joey says.

Getting there was tighter than it looked. "It was not as simple as it looks," Anish says. "For us to get that prototype done, the team really worked hard. We were running against the clock, because manufacturing new molds takes really long."

Both see the significance in what the pairing solves at once. Joey's batteries avoid critical minerals entirely.

"It's not dependent on lithium, cobalt, nickel, and it will complement the current technology, which is lithium ion," he says. "And on the other hand you have the waste problem. If we can marry the two, and we have two big markets in India and the Philippines, it's going to be transformational."

The prototype was presented on the final day of the fellowship in Paris. Field trials will determine whether it scales.

"It wasn't just a project," Anish says. "I actually think this has legs. That's the perfect kind of project. One that has the potential to become something real."

"We didn't think we'd be able to show something here in Paris," Joey says. "But we're glad we were able to demonstrate that it's possible. If you're persistent and you believe, with the right partnership, you can do great things."