Charge your smartphone with a potted plant

Going green is incredibly important in today’s society. If you can take steps to be more environmentally conscious in your daily activities, you’re quite literally saving the world and I don’t think you need me to tell you that saving the world is incredibly cool.

Since going green is cool, there probably isn’t a cooler way to charge your smartphone than with the Bioo Lite. Hint: It’s with a potted plant.

In the most literal iteration of a power plant, Bioo has come up with a flowerpot that lets your plants generate power to charge your devices. In a nutshell, this pot basically turns the leaves on your plants into solar panels by harnessing the energy from photosynthesis. The resulting compounds generated by this organic process then react with embedded bacteria in the pot to create electrons which are subsequently gathered by a nanowire network and fed to an accumulator.

The energy stored in the accumulator is then sent up via a USB cable to the top of the flowerpot which you can then plug your phone in and charge. If all of that sounds a little too complicated, check out Bioo’s video explaining this process:

It’s pretty cool that from this natural organic process, the folks at Bioo were able to harness and generate 5V/1A of electrical current without damaging either the plant or the environment. Sure, this may be a pot now, but imagine the possibilities of this could be expanded to say an entire park or forest reserve.

The biggest foreseeable problem with this flowerpot charger is the fact that it’s a crowdfunded project. Crowdfunding products are often fabulous on paper but have frequently run into problems when it comes to meeting production requirements and how well the actual retail device will perform.

Either way, this is a cool product and I hope that Bioo can pull through with this piece of tech. They’ve already smashed their crowdfunding goal of EUR15,000 and are expecting to ship the pots by the end of this year. If you’re interested in learning more, check out their Indiegogo page or website.

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