Olympics

Recycling project for 2020 Games medals achieves goal

Kyodo

The recycled metal needed to produce next summer’s 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals has been collected and refined, the Tokyo Games organizing committee said Wednesday.

The collection campaign for obsolete mobile phones and other small electronic devices ran from April 2017 through this past March. Local government offices received roughly 78,985 tons of donated goods.

Stores of mobile phone provider NTT Docomo Inc. collected 6.2 million mobile phones.

The whole collection process generated 32 kg of gold, 3,500 kg of silver and 2,200 kg of copper.

Organizers originally said they needed 4,100 kg of silver and 2,700 kg of copper, some metal was available from scrap so less was actually collected. Silver was most in demand because the gold medals will be made of silver except for their surface areas.

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