The medals awarded during next summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo鈥攕et to kick off July 24, 2020鈥攚ill be completely made from recycled materials. The process has been in the works since early 2017, when Japan announced it would collect old electronics and repurpose them into medals. Since then, the organizing committee has gathered over 47,000 tons of tech waste and more than 5 million cell phones in an effort to make the Games more sustainable.
The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games sought to collect around 70 pounds of gold, 7,700 pounds of silver, and 4,850 pounds of bronze鈥攁ll from various donated electronic gadgets鈥攖o fashion approximately 5,000 medals for next year’s Games. The Japanese government will further recycle any source materials that aren’t used to make the medals.
Tokyo took inspiration from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which implemented a similar method of reusing electronics鈥搒uch as TVs, computers, and keyboards鈥攆or their medals.