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 last week.

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 kilograms of gold, 3,500 kilograms of silver and 2,200 kilograms of copper. Organizers originally said they needed 4,100 kilograms of silver and 2,700 kilograms of copper but 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 surfaces.

Today, tons of electronic waste in Japan have become a rich “urban mine” in Japanese. A mobile phone contains more than 20 precious metals such as gold, silver, copper and aluminum.

The high efficiency of home appliance recycling assures that Japan will acquire more precious metals. And Japan’s systematic recycling and refinery mechanism has been operating for years.(SD-Agencies)