The main challenges to implement sustainable energy storage technologies are the utilization of earth-abundant recyclable materials, low costs, safe cell reactions and high performance, all in a single system. Aluminum batteries seem to cover these requirements. However, their practical performance is still not comparable with the state of the art high performance batteries. A key aspect to further development could be the combination of aluminum with charge storage materials like conductive polymers in non-aqueous electrolytes taking advantage of the properties of each material. This reviewpresents the approaches and perspectives for rechargeable aluminum-based batteries as sustainable high-performance energy storage devices. (c) The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.