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from the better-than-in-the-landfill dept.
Tokyo Olympic organisers on Wednesday called on the Japanese public to donate old smartphones and other old electronic devices to help make medals for the 2020 Games.
In a push to give the Olympics an environmentally friendly hue, Tokyo's organising committee is aiming to collect eight tonnes of gold, silver and bronze at recycling bins across Japan from April, officials said, to make 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals.
Tokyo 2020 said e-waste such as digital cameras, laptops and games units can also be donated at collection boxes in more than 2,000 stores of mobile phone giant and Olympic sponsor NTT Docomo.
Recycled metals have been used in previous years to make Olympic medals, including in Rio last year where the silver and bronze medals were 30 percent made from recycled materials.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 03 2017, @04:34PM
I suspect that the latter option depends a lot on the age of the phone. I have an old HTC Desire (Bravo, for US folk), which has a 1GHz processor and ought to be pretty useable. Unfortunately, even the most recent CyanogenMod for it ships with an old SSL implementation and an outdated root certificate set, so it's impossible to connect to any recent SSL server. I managed to side-load CSipSimple and gave it to my mother to make cheap calls from home on, but it's basically useless as a smartphone. You could probably sell it for $2, but I doubt that you could sell it for enough to make a $2 profit.
The lack of standardisation in the mobile phone world means that devices become useless (or, worse, still appear to function but vulnerable to drive-by malware) after a few years, even though the hardware is fine. A 1GHz single-core processor is a lot slower than a modern phone, but is massive overkill for a lot of uses, yet there's no vaguely modern OS that I can install on a 6-year-old phone. In contrast, I can run a modern OS on a 15-20 year old laptop or desktop and continue using it.
sudo mod me up