The opening ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics may be in one year, but the medal designs have just been unveiled. Nearly 80,000 tons of mobile phones as well as electronic devices were collected from all around Japan, and will be used in the handcrafting every gold, silver and bronze Olympic and Paralympic medal awarded to athletes at next year’s games. There expect to be approximately 5,000 medals handed out between the two games.
In the gargantuan haul of electronics was over 6 million mobile phones, and as a result of the two-year donation drive, Tokyo 2020 announced that 100% of the metals used to make the awards will be extracted from materials found in these donated electronics / phones. To be more specific, about 158 million pounds of the donated electronics was reduced down to 71 pounds of gold, 7,700 pounds of silver, and 4,850 pounds of bronze.
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Once the phones / electronics have been dismantled, extracting and then refining the metals, they’ll be fused into the Olympic medals, which were created by designer Junichi Kawanishi, who won a competition held by Tokyo 2020 that drew over 400 entries.
