On Wednesday, the Organising Committee of the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo unveiled the designs for 2020 Olympic medals (also revealed medal ribbon and medal case) made from recycled electronic waste.
There is only a year to go until the opening ceremony of the 2020 Summer Games. And Tokyo has been preparing for the event for a long time. Recently Toyota, the automotive giant who is going to play a significant role at the Tokyo Olympic showcased its robot lineup for the summer games, to entertain and assist athletes and sports fans during the event.
In 2017, Tokyo’s organizing committee launched a “Tokyo 2020 Medal Project” to collect assorted electronic waste, including old smartphones and laptops from the public to collect metal for the medals. Between April 2017 and March 2019, people from all over Japan donated their small electronic devices, from which engineers recovered the gold, silver, and bronze necessary.
This is not the first time when recycled metals are used to make Olympic medals. Earlier, in Rio Olympic, some 30 percent of the silver and bronze in medals came from recycled materials.
This time, engineers were able to recover approx. 32kg of gold, 3,500kg (approx.) of silver and 2,200kg (approx.) of bronze (95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc) from collected 78,985 tons of electronics. That figure includes 6.21 million used mobile phones collected by NTT Docomo shops across Japan.
“We hope that our project to recycle small consumer electronics and our efforts to contribute to an environmentally friendly and sustainable society will become a legacy of the Tokyo 2020 Games,” Organisers said.
