Date | Aug 24, 2016:
Japan is already winning our hearts four years before the Tokyo Olympics is due to start.
Nikkei, a Japanse news outlet reports the organizers for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be putting millions of discarded smartphones and other electronic devices into use to make Olympic medals.
Electronics come with small amounts of bronze, silver and gold and when they are discarded, these devices along with the precious metals go to waste. Some companies even recycle these devices to extract the metals.
Apple, for example comes out with a report every year on how much metal it extracts from e-wastes. In 2015, the company reported it retrieved more than 2,220 pounds worth of gold from e-waste.
Japan is less endowed with natural resources but it has 16 per cent of silver and 22 per cent of the world's gold and silver in e-waste, the highest among any country in the world.
Most countries usually ask mining companies to donate the metals to carve medals out of them, but not the Land of The Rising Sun. Japan will make use of its e-waste resources. It will have an added advantage of cleaning up the environment as well.
But there's challenges there as well. For one, Japan's government collects only a minuscule portion of the total e-waste produced in the country, making it difficult to have enough resources to make medals. Also, e-waste is already being recycled to produce other devices and hence allocating them to make medals with harm the country financially.
(Source: http://www.gizmodo.in/)