There are untold energy sources all around us, if we can just figure out how to tap into them. Swiss researchers have now demonstrated an environmentally friendly way to make spongy wood flooring that can generate electricity with every step.

The material works using what’s called the piezoelectric effect. Essentially, as the material is compressed under mechanical stress, positive and negative charges separate to opposite surfaces, generating a voltage when connected.

If you make flooring out of these materials, the thinking goes, you can harvest energy from footsteps as people walk on them. This principle has been put to work in PaveGen’s pavement tiles and its soccer pitches that power their own lights. Similar energy-harvesting floors instead tap into the triboelectric effect, where electricity is generated through friction as nanofibers rub together.

In new studies, researchers at ETH Zurich and EMPA investigated the piezoelectric potential of a common building material – wood. Normally it’s not flexible enough to generate much electricity, so the team developed a way to give it more give.

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