Japan uses piezoelectric sidewalks to convert footsteps into electricity, harnessing high foot traffic for renewable energy since 2008.
Japan lives in a cyberpunk-styled future that twines tech in the most mundane of things. You can find robots performing repetitive tasks at restaurants, like peeling a banana or frying chips, while the bullet train zips past cities at a whopping 200 mph. The tech-inclined nation even has futuristic toilets that can measure your blood pressure and protein content while you are on the loo. Japan even holds the world record for the fastest internet at 1.02 Petabits-per-second. Another excellent example of Japanese innovation is the piezoelectric sidewalks that turn footsteps into electricity.
Japan is a small nation with a fairly high population density. For comparison, the U.S. is almost 26 times bigger than Japan, but it only has roughly three times Japan’s population. This high population density gives rise to crowded streets and subway stations like the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which sees over 3.8 million passengers every day. Rather than treating such high footfall as a liability, Japan has harnessed footsteps to generate renewable electricity since 2008. Piezoelectric tiles work by converting the mechanical energy from a footstep into electrical energy that can be stored for later use. That said, this seemingly perfect source of power hasn’t yet become mainstream in other parts of the world.
