This review provides a comprehensive overview about the “hidden champion” of lithium-ion battery technology – graphite.

In this review, we discuss the most recent developments in the field of green binders for batteries and supercapacitors and explain how they could decrease cost and environmental impact, and yet improve the performance of electrochemical energy devices. The different classes of green binders reported to date in the literature are firstly classified according to their processability (the solvent required for electrode manufacturing), chemical composition (F-free), and natural availability (synthetic or bio-derived). The benefits originating from their employment are analysed for different devices. The most popular lithium-ion batteries are thoroughly discussed both from the anode and the cathode side. While high capacity Si-based anodes benefit from enhanced cyclability due to the interaction between the active particles’ surface and the functional groups of, e.g., polysaccharides such as carboxymethyl cellulose and alginate, the transition to water-processable cathodes is certainly more challenging. In particular, strategies to suppress the aluminium corrosion affecting most lithiated transition metal oxides are discussed. Despite the much more limited literature available, the role of the binder is increasingly recognized in the emerging field of lithium–sulphur and sodium-ion batteries, and electrochemical double layer capacitors and, therefore, here discussed as well.

This review is an attempt to report the latest development in lithium–sulfur batteries, namely the storage system that, due to its potential energy content, is presently attracting considerable attention both for automotive and stationary storage applications. We show here that consistent progress has been achieved, to the point that this battery is now considered to be near to industrial production. However, the performance of present lithium–sulfur batteries is still far from meeting their real energy density potentiality. Thus, the considerable breakthroughs so far achieved are outlined in this review as the basis for additional R&D, with related important results, which are expected to occur in the next few years.