BETTER RE Will Upcycle Your Used Smartphone Battery Into a Portable Charger

We all know that lithium ion batteries are harmful to the environment, but now there’s a way to repurpose them to make them useful again. Thanks to a KickStarter campaign, BETTER RE aims to “better reuse” your old smartphone battery by determining which of your batteries have enough efficiency, then turning them into a power source. Lithium ion batteries are normally left to waste after the phone is used and replaced (currently, phone users have an average replacement cycle of 1.3 years), but after two years, most batteries still have at least 80 percent of efficiency within them. Ironically, smartphone users are constantly facing a battery shortage due to over-usage, so in response, external batteries have become a norm. In order to ameliorate both problems, BETTER RE transforms your unused lithium ion batteries into a power source that looks sleek and is good for the environment. Simple to use, you just attached your battery into the external charger, and it fits a wide variety of common batteries. For more information, check out its KickStarter page, with 45 hours left (as of press time) to back the cause which has already raised $60,000 USD.