An associate professor in Japan is testing the viability of an ingredient normally found in cosmetic products, titanium oxide, for use in next-generation rechargeable batteries.

“It’s a material that offers safety, rapid recharging, and durability,” said the scientist and an associate professor at Tottori University, Hiroyuki Usui.

Used in cosmetics, soaps, and sunscreen, Usui sees titanium oxide as a potential solution to some of the obstacles that occur in making future solid-state batteries and sodium-ion batteries and believes the substance could be used to make battery anode material.

Usui’s solution is also inexpensive, coming in at roughly 1,000 yen or $10.60 for one kilogram of titanium oxide or only a tenth of the price of the lithium titanium oxide incorporated in high-performance batteries, according to Nikkei Asia.

Sustainability-wise, titanium ore is abundant worldwide, and it is made easily with sulfuric acid and titanium oxide crystals.

Usui says that titanium oxide crystals could enable thousands of recharge cycles, and with the collaboration of multiple corporate partners, he intends to present this option to the market once his trials are over and manufacturing is configured.

One obstacle, however, is that lithium-ion batteries are made using titanium oxide anode material, which typically only has roughly 70% of the energy storage capacity of typical graphite anode batteries.

To circumvent this challenge, Usui found that titanium oxide can be applied to the manufacturing of solid-state batteries and sodium-ion batteries, which both could be the next step up from lithium-ion batteries.

According to Usui, titanium oxide can remove the necessity of sintering, a manufacturing procedure including high temperatures that can cause unintended chemical reactions and an ensuing reduction in performance for solid-state batteries. In comparison, the titanium oxide version can be constructed at room temperature.

From an environmentally friendly standpoint, titanium oxide can enable sodium-ion batteries to have around 1,000 recharging cycles because the sodium required can be mined from the ocean in abundant amounts.

Additionally, sodium-ion batteries could be the answer to volatility problems with lithium’s supply.