Your old computer could be a gold medal now

Since we’ve apparently been mandated by the Department of Homeland Security with providing more Olympics coverage, I thought I’d take note of the fact that, for the first time ever, the medals hanging around Olympians necks in Vancouver will be partially made with recycled materials:   The more than 1,000 medals to be awarded at ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.
Clive Rose/Getty Images
Clive Rose/Getty Images
Clive Rose/Getty Images

Since we've apparently been mandated by the Department of Homeland Security with providing more Olympics coverage, I thought I'd take note of the fact that, for the first time ever, the medals hanging around Olympians necks in Vancouver will be partially made with recycled materials:  

Since we’ve apparently been mandated by the Department of Homeland Security with providing more Olympics coverage, I thought I’d take note of the fact that, for the first time ever, the medals hanging around Olympians necks in Vancouver will be partially made with recycled materials:  

The more than 1,000 medals to be awarded at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, which kick off today, amount to 2.05 kilograms of gold, 1,950 kilograms of silver (Olympic gold medals are about 92.5 per cent silver, plated with six grams of gold) and 903 kilograms of copper. A little more than 1.5 percent of each gold medal was made with metals harvested from cathode ray tube glass, computer parts, circuit boards and other trashed tech. Each copper medal contains just over one percent e-waste, while the silver medals contain only small traces of recycled electronics. …

Teck Resources, the Vancouver-based company that extracted the metals used to make the medals, noted in a press release that it used a number of different recovery processes. The company shredded computers, monitors, printers and glass and then separated out steel, aluminum, copper, glass and other usable substances. The leftover shredded components were fed into a furnace operating at a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius in order to remove the metals that could not be recovered simply by shredding the electronic devices.

I’m definitely not an expert in this, but it seems to me that it would take an awful lot of energy to extract (and detoxify?) the material and run a 1,200 degree (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit) furnace — especially for about 30 kilograms of actual recycled material. 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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