Tokyo Olympic medals are made from recycled phones!
The Olympic and Paralympic Games to be held in Japan next year are going to be truly extraordinary. The island nation has unveiled its Olympic medals made from recycled mobile phones?
The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games said its Tokyo 2020 Medal Project sourced small electronic devices from all over Japan to create 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals. The committee started the project when in 2017 it asked the citizens to donate all old and used mobile phones. The Tokyo 2020 Medal Project also included a medal design competition that invited the public to submit design ideas for the medals. The winning medal was designed by Junichi Kawanishi.
The project brought in 78,895 tons of electronic devices—including 6.21 million mobile phones. Both the gold and silver medals are made entirely from pure silver, though the former uses more than six grams of gold plating on top of the silver base. The bronze medals are made from a red brass alloy, which is 95 percent copper and five percent zinc.
This isn’t the first time old gadgets have been repurposed to create Olympic medals. The medals used in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games were also made with metals that had been recovered from unwanted technology.
Fun fact
The five Olympic rings represent the five major regions of the world – Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceana, and every national flag in the world includes one of the five colors, which are (from left to right) blue, yellow, black, green, and red.
Rate Now