Olympics with a green twist - Tokyo 2020 to have medals made from recycled electronic waste

All medals for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will be made from metal collected by recycling electronic waste, games organisers said on Friday. Tokyo's organising committee in 2017 launched a project to collect assorted electronic waste -- including old smartphones and laptops -- from the public to collect metal for the medals. Recycled metal has also been collected from local Japanese businesses and industry. In a statement issued on Friday, organisers said the collection was expected to reach its goal and will end in late March. By November last year, municipal authorities had already collected 47,488 tonnes of discarded devices, with the public handing in another five million used phones to a local network provider.   

Organisers had set a target of 2,700 kgs (about 5,950 pounds) of bronze, 30.3 kgs (67 pounds) of gold and 4,100 kg (about 9,040 pounds) of silver. They hit the target for bronze last June, and by October had more than 90 percent of the gold and 85 percent of the silver. "It is estimated that the remaining amounts of metal required to manufacture all Olympic and Paralympic medals can be extracted from the devices already donated," the organisers said.     

Recycled metals have been used in previous years to make Olympic medals, including in Rio where some 30 percent of the silver and bronze in medals came from recycled materials. The designs for the Tokyo 2020 medals will be unveiled later this year.

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Sports Minister Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore has promised "surgical" precision in distribution of funds to athletes preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games, asserting that centralisation of the process has made bureaucratic hurdles a thing of past.

Speaking to PTI on the sidelines of a function to felicitate medal winners of the recently-concluded 18th Asian Games in Indonesia, Rathore elaborated on the initiatives, that he feels, have put India on the path of becoming a sporting powerhouse.

"We have very clearly and very professionally divided our working between grassroots and elite sportspersons. The elite athletes are being looked after by a different set of professional people so that there is no bureaucracy," Rathore, an olympic silver-medallist in double-trap shooting, said.

"We have just begun working on systems that can connect the athletes to the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) absolutely straight, transparent and quick," he added.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Tokyo will host the 2020 edition of the Summer Olympics.
• The last time Tokyo hosted the Olympics was in 1964.
• India last won a gold medal in the Olympics during the 2008 games in Beijing.