With more and more electric vehicles (EV) hitting the market, the need for better and more robust energy storage system increases, and silicon has been a promising candidate for the next generation anode material to satisfy the high energy density and high-power requirements for electric vehicles because of its extremely high theoretical capacity. However, silicon as an anode has two major issues: It undergoes huge volume expansion (~ 300%) during lithiation which leads to the pulverization of the electrode structure, and at high charge and discharge rates, its low electrical conductivity hampers the battery performance. In this study attempts are made to solve both these fundamental issues. One approach to address the first issue is to use silicon carbon-based composites and engineer void spaces for the effective accommodation of silicon volume expansion. The internal pores give breathing room for the silicon to expand, which maintains the structural integrity. Two approaches to create these porous silicon/graphene electrode structures namely via a sacrificial polymer and via graphene nanoribbons and compare the two approaches by quantifying the reduction in volume expansion due to the engineered voids. In addition, to overcome the limitations of silicon at fast charging and discharging rates silicon anodes are paired with Polyimide (PI)/Polysilsesquioxane (PSSQ) hybrid separators. This synergistic combination of high-rate capable silicon/graphene anode and hybrid separator outperforms the commercially used separator especially at high-rate cycling. The second part of this thesis focusses more on the reduction of cost of both silicon and graphene in silicon/graphene hybrid anodes. One attractive option to reduce the cost substantially, is by using milled low-cost metallurgical Si which is obtained from the recycled scrap from solar or semi-conductor industry. Most of the graphene available commercially is made from reduction of graphene oxide obtained via oxidation of graphite under acid conditions, followed by heat, chemical or plasma treatment leading to increase in cost in the final product, and we replace rGO with mechanically exfoliated graphene directly from the aqueous suspension of graphite particles in a high shearing Taylor-Couette reactor set-up. We demonstrate that combining cost-effective milled silicon and exfoliated graphene can reduce the cost of milled silicon/graphene hybrid anodes can reduce the cost by several orders of magnitude, without sacrificing the battery performance. The solar recycled silicon contains several impurities which are detrimental to the battery performance and hence the third part of this thesis focusses on different types of surface treatment and their effects on the electrochemical performance of recycled silicon-based batteries. The second part of this section will focus on the effect of different kinds of graphitic pre-cursor for the synthesis of graphene and their effect on the electrochemical performance of silicon-graphene hybrid anodes. This section will conclude with demonstrating the impressive electrochemical performance of a system composed completely of materials sourced from the recycled streams with solar recycled silicon and graphitic pre-cursor sourced from recycled batteries which is used to synthesize graphene and combined as a silicon-graphene hybrid anode. The last part of this thesis focusses on the future work by demonstrating applications of cost-effective graphene coating.