Unique! It Turns Out That The 2020 Tokyo Olympics Gold Medal Is Made From Used Cell Phones

Tokyo 2020 Olympics gold medal, comes from recycling used goods. (photo: doc. olympic Tokoyo 2020)

JAKARTA - The 2020 Tokyo Olympics is a prestigious sporting event. Sports athletes who manage to win in the match will get a gold medal. Interestingly, the medal is not 100 percent gold-based.

Quoted from Insider, Wednesday, August 4, it turns out that the Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medal only has 1.2 percent pure gold content. The remaining 98.8 percent is silver.

That fact was revealed by Compound Interest, a science communication site that researches chemical compounds. So, each 1.2-pound gold medal contains only 6.7 grams of gold.

Interestingly, Japan earned 5.000 gold, silver, and bronze medals for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics from recycled electronic devices such as cell phones donated by people across the country. Over a span of two years, the Tokyo 2020 Medal Project collected 78.985 tons of electronic devices, including 6.21 million mobile phones from across Japan.

It takes up to 40 phones to save a gram of gold. To do this, the devices were heated and then melted and extracted the metal within, which yielded 70.5 pounds (32 kg) of gold, 7.716 pounds (3.500 kg) of silver, and 4.850 pounds (2.200 kg) of bronze.

Also reported by CNN International, during the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the gold medal also contained only about 6 grams of gold, even though the medal itself was about a tenth of a pound lighter than the one awarded in Tokyo. Usually, gold medals only have a thin layer of gold surrounding the silver base.

Only the silver medal in this year's match weighs as much as the gold medal. Lighter, there is also a bronze medal weighing 1 pound, bronze is a mixture of 95 percent copper, tin, and 5 percent zinc.

This is the first time in Olympic history that medals have come from recycled mobile phones, although 30 percent of the silver medals from the 2016 Olympics have also come from recycled silver from auto parts and rear-view mirrors.