Japan will make the medals for the 2020 Olympic Games using recycled consumer electronic devices such as cellphones and home appliances.
“Japan is undertaking an interesting project,” Nakagawa Masaharu, Japan’s environment minister, said during an environmental ministers’ meeting for China, Japan and Korea in Suwon, south of Seoul, Friday. “This is very meaningful in that it recycles rare metals and makes people think about the environment.”
The minister also showed interest in cooperation with Korea and China.
“We recognize that collecting rare metals from used devices is a very important issue. In the future, we would like to think about possible cooperation between the three countries, Japan, Korea and China,” the minister said.
Since the project was announced in February, the Japanese government set up collection boxes at local offices and retail shops across the country, according to news report. According to Japan’s environment ministry, by the end of May, it had collected 106 tons of electronic devices. In addition, 530,000 cell phones have been collected.
Altogether, Japan needs 5,000 medals, gold, silver and bronze, and traditionally, the Olympic game host cities have purchased the metals from companies.
Electronic devices are valuable sources of rare earth metals, including gold, silver, nickel and lithium.
Gold and silver are found in mobile phones, tablet and laptop computers, CD players, DVD players, TV sets, microwaves and others.
Efforts have been made to recycle recyclable electronics. Currently, some are dumped to be buried or burnt down, but also shipped to places such as China and India where the metals get separated by chemical processes and reused.
Greenpeace, a global environmental NGO, was at the forefront of rare metal recycling campaigns, by pushing cell phone and tablet makers.
The cooperation among China, Japan and Korea in making medals, if realized, will score a major positive point with their complex relations.
Common history and North Korea have for long been sources of tensions among the three countries. Between Korea and Japan, the Dokdo islets and the former sex slavery of the Japanese military in WWII are thorny issues. Two Sino-Japan wars left the bilateral relations between Japan and China on the ice. Between China and Korea, the deployment of the U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense system is an unsettling problem.
Environmentally speaking, yellow dust from Inner Mongolia and dust from fast-industrializing China has caused deep concerns for Koreans and Japanese, with some individuals and news media outlets demanding China apologize and compensate potential victims. The three ministers have met for 19 years now to discuss environmental issues and cooperation.