Waste to sustainable energy based on TENG technology: A comprehensive review

The generation of waste materials is an inevitable byproduct of various human and ecological activities. Inadequate management of waste materials can have detrimental effects on the environment, leading to long-lasting harm to both living organisms and the broader ecosystem. A waste-to-sustainable energy concept based on TENGs is a new research technology added to the other green and renewable technologies. It is highly efficient technology in using a wide range of waste materials to convert chaotic environmental energies into green electricity for various intelligent applications. In this review, waste materials are classified non-degradable waste (plastic waste), bio-degradable waste, and a combined waste. These types of waste materials showed great capability in converting low frequency wasted mechanical energies into electrical pulses for various applications in healthcare, IoT and wireless technologies and smart buildings. It is worth noting that utilizing plastic waste as tribo-pairs doe does not compromise the performance efficiency of the fabricated TENGs. For instance, a non-modified X-ray waste film has been used as a positive tribo-layer for force sensing application. The TENG showed great performance with maximum power density of 8.78 W/m2 (Navaneeth et al., 2023a,b) which is comparable to the TENGs fabricated using prepared tribo-materials. We propose waste-to-sustainable energy technology based on TENGs as a promising and sustainable alternative for the generation of renewable energy and the upcycling of waste materials.