Olympic gold medals are not pure gold anymore! They are made of garbage and old building materials! Countries have started a garbage competition...

The athlete who won an Olympic medal at the Paris Olympics actually received a piece of old Eiffel Tower building material?

Paris is currently the only host city to give away historic landmarks on medals. So, the winning athlete can... bring Paris home?

In February 2024, the organizers of the Paris Olympics announced the Olympic medals designed by jeweler Chaumet. We can see that there is a hexagonal iron block inlaid in the middle of the Olympic and Paralympic medals. This 18-gram iron block is not ordinary iron, but the old building material of the real Eiffel Tower.

The hexagon in the middle is a small piece of the Eiffel Tower wreckage. Image source: Internet

Since its construction in the 1880s, the Eiffel Tower's iron frame has been refurbished many times, and some of the iron has been removed. It is said that the scraps have been kept in a secret warehouse by the Eiffel Tower's operating company, and now it has been made into 5,084 medals...

These iron blocks were collected during the Eiffel Tower's multiple renovations.

It sounds quite new that old building materials have been turned into Olympic medals. In fact, many people should already know that Olympic gold medals are not made of pure gold. The last pure gold Olympic gold medal appeared in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics more than 100 years ago, and then there is no more, but now the International Olympic Committee stipulates that the gold medal must contain 550 grams of high-quality silver and 6 grams of gold.

A gold broker wrote in 2012 that if a 400-gram pure gold medal was to be made, it would cost about $25,000 based on the gold price at the time (2012), and the organizers would have to spend $50 million on the medal.

This Stockholm Olympic gold medal is made of real gold

However, as the Olympic Games pursue the goal of sustainable development, the organizers of each session have come up with new ideas for medals. And the meaning of an Olympic medal may not be as simple as "gold".

The medals for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics included a variety of recycled materials. The ribbons that hung the medals were made from recycled plastic bottles, and the silver medals were made from old car parts, X-rays and broken mirrors. The Brazilian Mint also made bronze medals from scrap copper from its own factories.

Medal, ribbon and wooden box contain recycled materials

In addition, the wood for the wooden box that holds the medals also comes from sustainable forests in Brazil. These forests are managed in a sustainable way, which prevents them from being completely cut down, while allowing more wild animals to live in them.

In the Tokyo Olympics, the organizers used the "garbage alchemy" method to make medals from the electronic "garbage" provided by Japanese residents. The BBC reported that as of 2018, the organizers had received more than 4 million old mobile phones and 30,000 tons of small electronic devices donated by the public.

Whose old mobile phone or appliance is this medal?

In order to meet the Olympic Committee's requirements for Olympic medals, people can extract precious metals from electronic waste, such as extracting 1g of gold from 35 to 40 mobile phones. People call this practice "urban mining". From tens of thousands of tons of electronic waste, the organizers need to extract 30 kilograms of gold, 4,100 kilograms of silver and 2,700 kilograms of copper.

The proofreader has come up with a lot of ideas again!

This may raise awareness of recycling e-waste, which has become the fastest growing waste in the world, even to the point of an "e-waste tsunami", with hundreds of millions of tons of old home appliances, screens and instruments around the world, and only 20% of them being recycled.

The problem of electronic waste needs to be solved urgently. If it is not recycled scientifically, it will pollute the environment and endanger human health.

In fact, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics also included a small amount of electronic component waste in the medals, but the amount recycled was smaller, only about 1%.

The "Garbage Fighting" competition has also continued this year. The audience seats at the Paris Olympics are also made of renewable plastics. Their prototypes are actually local trash cans and millions of water bottle caps in the trash cans? The podium of the Paris Olympics is made of recycled plastic food containers. Therefore, when you are watching the wonderful sports events held this year, don't forget to pay attention to these small infrastructures.

Are these stadium seats actually discarded trash cans? Image credit: Markus Spiske

Also worth your attention are the Paralympic medals. Paralympic medals have had Braille designs since the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, but in Rio, the medals were turned into "rattles" that rattle when shaken, with gold medals making the loudest rattles and bronze medals making the quietest. This way, visually impaired people can tell what medal they are by just shaking it.

The outermost ring of the Beijing Winter Paralympics is engraved with Braille. Image source: Internet

The Olympics is not only a grand sporting event, but there are also many details that deserve your attention. In addition to the wonderful sports, the cooperation between scientists and social organizations in various fields is also very interesting.

References

[1]https://olympics.com/en/news/designs-of-tokyo-2020-s-recycled-medals-unveiled

[2]https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympic-medals-eiffel-tower-333c751b65c7a2a70520b2d23f85692e#:~:text=Six%20small%20clasps%20th at%20hold,bind%20the%20Eiffel%20Tower%20together.&text=Around%20the%20iron%20pieces%20are,all%20recycled%2C%20not%20newly%20mined.

[3]https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/rio-2016/medal-design

[4]https://techreport.com/statistics/science/global-ewaste-statistics/

[5]https://www.paralympicheritage.org.uk/paralympic-medals

[6]https://rpra.ca/the-hub/paris-olympic-games-podiums-will-be-made-from-recycled-plastics/#:~:text=At%20this%20summer's%20Olympic%20and,of%20a%20repurposed%20steel%20foundry.

[7]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/winter-olympics-vancouver-recycled-medals

Planning and production

Source: Bring Science Home (id: steamforkids)

Author: Editor of Skin Magazine

Editor: Yang Yaping

Proofread by Xu Lailinlin