Tokyo 2020 keeps a balance between sports and environment through Medals
Updated Date: 30th July, 2019
The Olympic medals for Tokyo 2020 are unveiled by the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee of Olympic Games (TOCOG) on July 24, 2019 exactly one year to go before the start of the Games.
Junichi Kawanishi, the director of the Japan Sign Design Association and the Osaka Design Society was selected among 4400 entries to produce 5,000 medals. Kawanishi considers this job as a lifetime achievement and said “I never dreamed that the design I submitted only as a memorial to this lifetime event would actually be selected.”
Under the theme “Be better, together – for the planet and the people”, the TOCOG aims to have the most environmentally friendly and sustainable games. Therefore, the medals are moulded entirely from metal extracted from recycled consumer electronics over the past two years. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of Japan’s local authorities participated and a total of 78,985 tons of discarded devices were collected, a haul which included approximately 6.21 million used mobile phones, along with digital cameras, handheld games and laptops. Finally, they reached the goals of 30.3 kg of gold, 4,100 kg of silver and 2,700 kg of bronze were reached by the time the collection cycle closed on 31 March 2019.
On the other side, Japanese public contributed around 45 tons of household plastic in order to create the 100 podiums for the Games.
