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: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:59PM
The guys across the sea would like to volunteer a giant pile of mostly-new flagships...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:24PM
This is a nice political statement Japan is making, how "real" is it? I'm thinking that there is a non-trivial amount of metal (especially gold and silver) needed for the medals. I'm aware that they are plated and not solid metal, but there is still a substantial amount.
So for the gold, how much energy and manpower is needed to reclaim the metal from the tiny bits covering wires?
For the silver, how much silver will the actually be able to find in consumer electronics? I thought very little.
Plus the energy to collect this all, transport it and handle it.
At the end of the day, is it really any more environmental than mining it from the ground?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @02:06AM
Apparently the bronze and silver ones are fairly pure (in the lower 90s% of purity). The gold ones are about 1-2%.
http://www.kitco.com/news/2016-08-05/So-How-Much-Gold-Is-Actually-In-The-Olympic-Medals.html [kitco.com]
What will be interesting is the by products of this process. Auqua regia is not a 'nice' chemical.
Crushing and shredding them is actually a fairly easy process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QddEETnZRwU [youtube.com]
They probably will yank the batteries. Shred the phone part. Heat up the buckets of chaf enough to get the plastic to burn off, pool up the glass, etc. Then 2-3 trips through different chemical baths to get rid of any pollutant metals (copper, aluminum, etc). Then another trip through the furnace.
At the end of the day, is it really any more environmental than mining it from the ground?
Well at least the phones are not getting thrown in a landfill? The only thing that makes it worth doing is if the cost of the spot price is more than the recovery cost.
The amount of silver/gold in electronics is fairly low these days. But get something from the early 70s/80s? Those can be worth a decent amount. http://www.chipsetc.com/gold-value-in-computer-chips.html [chipsetc.com] Even then the chip itself may be worth more than the gold you could recover.
If you look at it it seems more like a feel good stunt than anything.
(Score: 4, Informative) by prospectacle on Thursday February 02 2017, @11:32PM
According to this guy at this university:
http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/research/documents/cellphonethesis.pdf [ucsb.edu]
You can make a slight profit (about 10c per phone) getting precious metals from old cell phones, especially if the volume is high. Costs about $1 to extract $1.1 of precious metals. So it's potentially cheaper than buying gold to make medals from.
However it looks like you can make about $2 profit per phone and save a lot more energy (that would otherwise be used to produce a new phone and dig up new precious metals) by refurbishing and selling phones second hand.
I couldn't easily find whether recovering precious metals from phones has less of an environmental impact than digging up/processing new metal.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Friday February 03 2017, @12:02AM
I love corporate charity drives. YOU do the work, and THEY get the credit. Like when you're at the supermarket check out and they ask you if you want to donate a dollar to "flavor of the month". You get the privilege of paying a dollar (only about $0.20 of which will actually get anywhere near a possible beneficiary), they get to say "Megamarkets gave $10,000,000 to flavor of the month!", and take a healthy tax deduction to boot!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 03 2017, @05:37AM
Despite what you say, I find the idea that members of the public will have donated a small portion of each event winner's medal to be somewhat touching. I think this'll make them a bit more special to the winners.
It's certainly more interesting than just doing a straight fundraising drive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @07:07AM
Maybe. But death of the Olympics as it currently is would be a much better deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @01:44PM
Dear Olympics® supporters,
The Committee is especially desirous of the following mobile handsets:
Thank you.