A salt water battery employs a concentrated saline solution as its electrolyte. They are nonflammable and more easily recycled than batteries that employ toxic or flammable materials

In 2008 Carnegie Mellon professor Jay Whitacre founded Aquion Energy and received venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. He won the 2015 Lemelson–MIT Prize, an award worth $500,000, for inventing the company’s salt water battery. They are the first and only battery manufacturer to have met all the stringent criteria to obtain Cradle-to-Cradle (Bronze) certification.[2] The company raised $190 million in equity and debt before going bankrupt in 2017, then being acquired by a Chinese company later that year for slightly under $10 million