Friday, July 7, 2017

2020 Tokyo Olympic Medals




The Tokyo Olympic Committee plans to make about 5,000 Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals for the Olympic and Paralympic Games from used mobile phones and other consumer electronics. The project aims to promote sustainability and reduce costs.  The Japanese people are asked to donate their old electronics at collection sites in local offices and telecom shops.  The collection boxes will remain until enough have been collected to produce the medals.  I have no idea how many old phones are needed to make 5,000 medals, but I'm thinking it must be a lot.



10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Pamela i think this is a great way to recycle phones,well done to Japan xx

Queeniepatch said...

Recycling is a great idea, but... think of the time when a phone (a landphone) was used for decades. We might recycle paper cups and PET bottles and think we are great, but in the past a china cup and a glass bottle were used for ages! Or even when I was a child, scoops of milk could be bought at the dairy and carried home in your own milk pail. I know these old fashioned methods are impractical in our modern world but...

kiwikid said...

What a wonderful idea to recycle. Maybe they could come up with good ideas for plastics now.

Janie said...

I agree, recycling is a good idea,
And takes creative insight.

Brigitte said...

I think that's a good thing to promote the recycling idea.

Lin said...

What a great idea. xx

D1-D2 said...

An excellent idea!

Carol- Beads and Birds said...

I'm with Queeniepatch. I hate that my family wants a bottle of water. I still drink from a glass and refrain from buying drinks on the go whenever possible. This IS a great way to recycle phones. I once saw a report on a electronics dump in China. They were apparently allowing "recycle" businesses to pay to dump their collected items there. The documentary showed kids playing in the rubble. Sad.
xx, Carol

rosey175 said...

I'm so glad they're doing this! But I hate to think that it should be done because there's just way too much trash. Planned obsolescence is such a terrible thing. I wonder what they plan to do with the rest of the phone?

Leonore Winterer said...

It's a great idea but wow, I don't want to think about how many phones you need to make just one gold medal! Although I suppose they are just gilded, not massive...okay, now I am thinking about it (and looking stuff up): You can get 1g of gold by recycling about 41 phones, and one gold medal contains about 6g of gold, so that's about 250 phones per gold medal!