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Tokyo 2020 is on track to create Olympic medals with recycled electronics

Luke Dormehl
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“Congratulations, you’re one of the most elite athletes to have ever graced planet Earth. Here’s a broken iPhone 4s and part of an old Game Boy Advance for your troubles.”

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OK, so that’s not exactly the sales pitch that the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, aka Tokyo 2020, is probably going for — but it’s not far from the truth, either. And that’s a good thing.

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Announced on Friday, February 8, the brains behind next year’s Summer Olympics revealed that they are on target to be able to forge all winning athletes’ medals from recycled electronics waste, consisting of discarded and obsolete electronic devices. This includes smartphones, digital cameras, handheld games consoles, and laptops.

The project to collect ewaste for the purpose was launched in Japan in April 2017, with thousands of collection centers established across the country. In all, some 47,488 tons of discarded devices have been collected by municipal authorities in Japan, in addition to more than 5 million used cell phones. By June 2018, the target amount of metal necessary for creating the Olympics bronze medals had already been gathered. By October 2018, so too had 93.7 percent of the necessary gold and 85.4 percent of silver. That puts the project firmly on track to achieve its goal.

Recycling electronics waste into Olympic medals isn’t going to solve the problem completely, of course. Other bolder initiatives will need to be launched to stop so many landfill-bound gadgets being disposed of every year to begin with. This could take the form of everything from legislation to insist on repairable devices to a more unorthodox concept such as Rice University’s research into the possibility of biodegradable, eco-friendly wooden electronics capable of decomposing once they are disposed of.

Nonetheless, this is a great attention-grabbing initiative that highlights the importance of electronics waste recycling, and shows that great things can be achieved with the proper public efforts. It’s pretty fitting, too: Shouldn’t the Olympic Games be about showing off humankind at its very best? We can’t think of too many better ways to do that.

The Tokyo 2020 medals will be publicly unveiled in the middle of 2019. You can color us excited to see them!

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Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
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In April 2017 the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee launched a campaign to collect old electronics from the public for the project. The metals for the medals were then harvested from those donated electronics. Many electronics, especially cell phones, contain small amounts of precious metals like silver, gold, and platinum.
Earlier this year the Olympic Committee announced they were on track to complete the project as planned. All told, it collected over 47,488 tons of discarded devices, and over 5 million used cell phones. Ultimately it was able to extract 32kg (70.5 pounds) of gold, 3,500kg (7,716 pounds) of silver, and 2,200kg (4,850 pounds) of bronze from the devices it collected.
The targeted amount of bronze -- some 2,700kg -- was already extracted from the donations by June of last year. By October 2018, 28.4kg of gold (93.7% of the targeted 30.3kg) and 3,500kg of silver (85.4% of the targeted 4,100kg) had been sourced from the donated devices.
Donated devices ran the gamut.  The collection included smartphones, digital cameras, handheld gaming consoles, and laptops, among other electronic devices. The devices were collected across about 2,400 NTT DOCOMO stores in Japan as well as 1,594 municipal authorities across Japan.
“The project has offered the public an opportunity to play an important role in the Games’ preparations,” stated February’s announcement that the group’s collection efforts had been met. The Olympic Committee says that beyond helping them build the medals, the collection draws attention to the importance of sustainability, which is also the slogan for the Olympics in 2020: “Be better, together -- for the planet and the people.”
Previous Olympic medals have used recycled materials in their contraction, but Tokyo claims that 2020 will be the first Olympics where the gold medals will be made using entirely recovered metal.
“Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic medals will be made out of people’s thoughts and appreciation for avoiding waste. I think there is an important message in this for future generations,” Japan’s three-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Kohei Uchimura said in 2017 when the recycling plan was first introduced.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic medals will each be 85mm in diameter and measure 7.7mm at their thinnest and 12.mm at their thickest parts.
The medals aren’t made entirely out of their respective precious metal and are instead plated in it. The gold medal, for instance, uses 6 grams of gold plating to get their gold coloring.
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