An old, unused smartphone lying around the house just collecting dust might one day be a source of admiration, dangling proudly around an Olympic athlete鈥檚 neck at a medal podium ceremony.
Hironao Ito, a sophomore at Waseda University, is hoping this idea alone will spark excitement among Japanese and give the country an excuse to ramp up efforts toward becoming a greener society ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.
Ito, 21, belongs to a university club known as Environment Rodrigues, a student-run body whose mission is to raise environmental awareness on campus.
The club, named after a lush tropical island in the Indian Ocean, was formed in 1997 and now has 50 members, including Ito.
Of the many projects the club is engaged in, Ito says none has attracted as much public interest as the 鈥渦rban mine medal project,鈥� a joint effort by Rodrigues and an academic society known as Ecomaterials Forum to create all three classes of Olympic medals using 100 percent recycled metals.
鈥淚 understand it would cost the country money, but I don鈥檛 see why anyone would say no to the idea of electronic waste recycling,鈥� Ito said in an interview.
Tokyo Olympic organizers said early last month they will support the recycling campaign by asking the public to donate old mobile phones and electrical appliances specifically for this purpose.
They also revealed that 2 tons of scrap metal now referred to as 鈥渦rban mines鈥� are needed to make 5,000 of the gold, silver and bronze medals.
A spokesperson for the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee said waste-collection companies are being recruited until the Monday deadline with an eye to starting the scrap-metal gathering activities next spring.
NTT Docomo Inc., which reclaims more than 3 million old mobile phones from customers each year, also plans to submit a cooperation proposal to the games organizers and contribute to the nationwide movement.
Should Japan succeed in the eco-friendly effort, it will become the first host country to provide Olympic medals made with 100 percent recycled materials.
According to Ito, using e-waste to reclaim bronze, or even silver, is not much of a challenge, but the steps involved in recovering gold are time-consuming and costly.
The Rio 2016 Organizing Committee revealed that the silver and bronze medals for the summer games were made 30 percent from coins, mirrors, X-ray plates and other recycled materials.
鈥淏ecause of the financial burden, no country has been able to make gold medals using only recycled materials. It means a lot that Japan takes on this challenge, more so because Japan is not resource-rich,鈥� he said.
Ito explained the five steps for recovering gold from a mobile phone: opening the device, removing the circuit board, melting it with iron sulfide, straining to separate the gold, and smelting.
In a report his team put together, he reveals that a smartphone generally contains only 0.03 gram of gold, and that 200 phones are required to produce six grams of pure gold 鈥� the minimum amount required by the International Olympic Committee to produce a gold medal.
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