Tokyo Olympic 2020 medals to be made entirely from recycled electronic gadgets

Tokyo Olympics 2020 is going to set a record in an endeavour towards sustainability. The best athletes in the world will be crowned with medals made entirely from e-waste materials. All the Olympics and Paralympics medals in Tokyo will be 100 percent made from recycled parts of discarded electronic products like smartphones, laptops, tabs, digital cameras etc.

The Tokyo Olympics Game Committee launched the Medal project in April 2017, which is first of its kind involving public as well as business and industry. This is one step further after the Rio Olympics 2016, in which 30 percent of the materials used in making medals, were recycled e-waste.

The officials of the organising committee expects to collect enough recyclable electronic products till the end of March 2019. In a statement, the officials said, "Thanks to the enthusiastic response from many individuals as well as corporations since the commencement of the medal project in March 2017, we have been able to secure the amount of materials required to produce the medals for Tokyo Olympics 2020, and therefore we have closed the collection at the end of Sunday, 31 March 2019. We sincerely thank all those who have contributed to this project, and hence we express our appreciation for all your continued support."

The committee said that the Municipal authorities from across Japan have collected 47,488 tonnes of e-waste. From these, 5.07 million units were used smartphones collected by NTT DOCOMO from shops across the country.

The target amount for Bronze medals was reached with the collected metals by June 2018. For Gold medals, 93.7 percent of 30.3 kg and 85.4 percent of 4,100 kg target had been reached by October 2018. And the authorities are confident of reaching the 100 percent target for gold and silver medals by the end of March 2019.

Once the collection is complete, all the e-waste materials will be classified and dismantled. After this process, the gold, silver and bronze medals will be produced once the extraction is done by the smelting contractors. Around 5,000 medals will be produced in total, for Olympics and Paralympics games.

Sports enthusiasts can expect to see the final designs of medals for Tokyo Olympics 2020 by this summer.