Along with the unceasing growth of worldwide economic and the associated issues on resources, energy and environment, clean energy generating technologies that are based on recyclable materials, if possible, may become the future trend of development. Here, we report the design of a cheap, lightweight, and recyclable single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that utilizes waste paper as the triboelectric material. Under the current strategy, we successfully developed green energy machines without vastly increasing the mining of various critical minerals around the world. The as-designed TENG could not only collect and convert mechanical energy into electricity with sound efficiency, but also has the merit for continuous reuse and quick construction. The maximum output power density is as high as 171 mW·m⁻² at a resistance of 130 MΩ and could be integrated into a book for monitoring reading actions, thus providing a new approach to the low-cost, green and sustainable self-powered electronic systems.

Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has been proved as a promising energy harvester in recent years, but the challenges of exploring economically triboelectric materials still exist and have aroused interests of many researchers. In this paper, chitosan-silk fibroin-airlaid paper composite film (CSA film) was fabricated and then the CSA film based-triboelectric nanogenerator (CSA-TENG) was constructed, which presents an opportunity for natural polymers to be applied in triboelectric materials. Due to the excellent electron donating ability of CSA film, the CSA-TENG can harvest environmental energy with a high efficiency. More importantly, the as-designed CSA film based dual-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator (CSA-D-TENG) is successfully assembled into hand clapper and trampoline to harvest mechanical energies generated by human bodies, it is also capable of monitoring human movement while harvesting biomechanical energies. This work provides a simple and environmental-friendly way to develop TENG for biomechanical energies harvesting and human motion monitoring.

Aybrid tribo/piezoelectric nanogenerators (HTPENG) have been proven to be highly efficient and versatile as far as the collection and conversion of ambient energy are concerned, and the introduction of flexible and green materials is a key step for their potential applications. Here, we developed a HTPENG by using nitrocellulose nanofibril paper as the triboelectric layer and BaTiO₃/MWCNT@bacterial cellulose paper as the piezoelectric layer. The output of the triboelelctric paper has considerable performance as fluorinated ethylene propylene, and the output of piezoelectric paper is more than ten times higher than the BTO/polydimethylsiloxane structure. The integrated outputs of the sandwich structured HTPENG are 18 V and 1.6 µA·cm^-2, which are capable of lighting up three LED bulbs and charging a 1 µF capacitor to 2.5 V in 80 s. In addition, the voltage signal generated by the HTPENG in contact-separation mode can be used for dynamic pressure detection. The linear range of dynamic pressure is from 0.5 to 3 N·cm^-2 with a high sensitivity of 8.276 V·cm²·N^-1 and a detection limit of 0.2 N·cm^-2. This work provides new insights into the design and application of cellulose-based hybrid nanogenerators with high flexibility and simple structure.