LED lamp powered by old batteries

Alkaline batteries – they are so small and commonplace that it becomes easy to throw them away without a second thought. But they often still have some perfectly good juice left in them – often .8 to 1.3 volts! Yanko Design, an online design magazine, has come up with a great idea for discarded batteries: Combine their power into something useful.

To that end, Yanko has designed The Energy Seed - an LED lamppost that is powered by discarded alkaline batteries. It only takes 2 volts to light up an LED lamp and if enough discarded batteries are inserted into specific slots for different sizes, their combined power will keep the lamp shining. In the poetic words of the Energy Seed motto, "trashed batteries can be born again as a seed to blossom light."

Seoul designer Sung Woo Park along with co-creator Sunhee Kim designed the prototype which is shaped like a flower in a pot. This flower-like lamp can be placed on, say, a public sidewalk where people can walk up and put their old batteries into the slots. It almost feels like seeding a plant! And once the batteries are completely drained, they are conveniently centralized into one place – to be picked up for recycling.

Via Gizmodo, Yanko Design