Batteries suck. They last a couple of hours, at best (no matter how they’re advertised) and leave a toxic legacy: poisonous metals in our watershed, landfills, and ultimately our bodies. So the following, from the NY Times, comes as good news:

As batteries go, the rechargeable lithium-ion variety is among the greenest options available. They can last for years, they are recyclable, and they don’t contain the toxic heavy metals found in many of their Walkman-powering predecessors.

Your iPod has a lithium-ion, and most likely, so does your laptop computer.

Now, ZPower, a company based in Camarillo, Calif., is developing a new kind of battery for consumer electronics that it says will be more powerful than lithium-ion, safer, and potentially more earth-friendly as well.

The technology ZPower is banking on is called silver-zinc, which it says will provide up to 40 percent more power than a lithium-ion battery of the same size.

Ross Dueber, the company’s chief executive, says a top-tier laptop manufacturer will release the first computer designed to accept silver-zinc batteries in mid-2009. The laptop’s runtime with silver-zinc will increase from the roughly 5 hours afforded by a typical lithium-ion battery to at least 7 hours…

…for more, click here.