Preparations for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have kicked into full gear, with the world's biggest quadrennial sports event just three years away.
One of the biggest challenges facing any host city for the Olympics is how to make the event sustainable. For Tokyo, organizers are trying to come up with new ways to make the games sustainable, through such projects as recycling metals from discarded cellphones into the medals awarded to Olympic athletes.
The Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee in April started a project to collect old mobile phones and small electronics from across the country. Scrapped electronics products are "urban mines" treasured for their rare metals, but Tokyo is the first Olympic host city ever to try to make use of these recycled materials. The project is off to a good start, with 500,000 cellphones already collected through NTT Docomo, which has supported it.