Tokyo 2020 officials responsible for making the medals have made an exciting announcement stating they will use recycled electronics to make them!
Tokyo, Japan – The 2020 Olympics and Paralympics will be taking place in Tokyo and as part of doing good, they have asked all citizens to donate old electronics which will be broken down and used to make the bronze, silver and gold medals.
The Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games launched Medal Project to manufacture the medals for use at Tokyo 2020 from consumer electronics such as used mobile phones. They are hoping to manufacture approximately 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals for the games.
“This project will be an exercise in citizen participation to manufacture medals with the help of people from across Japan. We will target a 100% recycling rate in the refining of gold, respecting the environment by using scrap metals in the manufacture of medals and employing Japanese technological expertise.
The idea of using recycled metals in medals has been used in the past. However, this project makes Tokyo 2020 a first in the history of the Olympics and Paralympics by involving citizens in the collection of consumer electronics for the purpose of manufacturing medals, and manufacturing medals from the extracted gold.”
The public portion of the project comes to an end on the 31st of March 2019 and so far they have been able to manufacture 100% of the Bronze medals, 85.4% of the silver and 93.7% of the gold medals.
The process started with the citizens donating old electronics, they then were dismantled. The gold was extracted from the electronics and refined until they had pure gold.
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