Neetu Jha

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people visit India’s temples, mosques, and gurdwaras. Their offerings of flowers become floral waste, with most going to landfills and over 8 million metric tons dumped into bodies of water each year (PDF). But some of those flowers find their way to Neetu Jha's laboratory at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai (ICT), where it is converted into high-performance green energy solutions where it is converted into high-performance green energy solutions.Jha uses secondary flower waste—leftovers she receives after a collaborator’s lab extracts the plants’ nutraceutical components. What’s left over is a dry, fibrous material that is great for making electrodes. “We do pyrolysis to convert it into a carbon material that looks powdery to the naked eye but spongy under the microscope,” she says. “We then activate [the material] using chemical treatment.” These carbon-based materials can be employed as catalyst supports because of their high surface area, optimal porosity, and good electrical conductivity.Jha is principal investigator at ICT’s Nano Energy Lab, which is focused on the development of electronic materials for energy storage devices like fuel cells, supercapacitors, and zinc-ion batteries. Jha’s other research interest is in water treatment. “We use biomass-based materials—such as secondary floral waste, diesel soot, and sweet lime peel–derived soot,” she says. Jha has a locomotor disability, which makes it difficult for her to walk long distances or climb stairs. She became disabled after she contracted polio at the age of 12. She needed 2 years of physiotherapy before she