2010 Winter Olympic Medals Made From Eletronic Waste
Athletes who participate in the Olympics are admired for their ability to test the mind, body, and soul of the human body. Their strength and endurance compels an audience, and in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the medals around the champions’ necks did as well.
Over 1,000 medals awarded at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games were made from recycled e-waste as a part of Vancouver’s effort to reduce electronic waste. Each medal was created with a small amount of the more than 140,000 tons of e-waste that otherwise would have been sent to Canadian landfills. The medals contained gold, silver, and copper that was recovered from recycled household appliances, electronics and cables, and recovered metals from computer parts and circuit boards.
The 2010 Olympic medals are the largest and heaviest medals to date with e-materials making up 1.52 percent of recovered gold in the gold medals, .0122 percent of recovered silver in the silver medals, and 1.11 percent of recovered bronze in the bronze medals. The medal supplier was a company named Teck Resources, which is Canada’s largest diversified mining, mineral processing, and metallurgical company.
As a result, when the 2010 Winter Olympic winners stood proud after their years of training, they were crowned with medals produced from cathode ray tube glass, computer parts, circuit boards and other trashed technology. Vancouver took the initiative to show the world the value of electronics recycling. Not only do e-materials still hold costly metals, but the ultimate value is the protection of the environment by limiting electronic waste. The Olympics demonstrated yet another example of excellence by turning recycled electronic waste into precious medals for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games champions.