Olympic Medal Made Of Old iPhones and Clothes Made Of Milk

Tokyo 2020 Olympic medals will be produced using recycled electronics.

Congratulations, you’re one of the most elite athletes to have ever graced planet Earth. Here’s a broken iPhone 4s and part of an old Game Boy Advance for your troubles. source

Imagine you're an athlete who just won the gold, silver, or bronze medal in Tokyo and the Olympic official telling you this while handing you out your well deserved medal! Funny, isn't it? I think it is and it's also great! Of course, it won't save the planet but it's something.

Announced on Friday, February 8, the brains behind next year’s Summer Olympics revealed that they are on target to be able to forge all winning athletes’ medals from recycled electronics waste, consisting of discarded and obsolete electronic devices. This includes smartphones, digital cameras, handheld games consoles, and laptops.

The project to collect ewaste for the purpose was launched in Japan in April 2017, with thousands of collection centers established across the country. In all, some 47,488 tons of discarded devices have been collected by municipal authorities in Japan, in addition to more than 5 million used cell phones. By June 2018, the target amount of metal necessary for creating the Olympics bronze medals had already been gathered. By October 2018, so too had 93.7 percent of the necessary gold and 85.4 percent of silver. That puts the project firmly on track to achieve its goal. source

Collecting precious metals for the medals is not an easy task as one device can't contain much. There will be 5000 medals, both for Olympic and Paralympic Games. I'm actually happy to read news like this. Others should do the same. Besides, the rest of the waste can also be used somehow, I'm sure of that and people can be happy knowing they've helped.

Milk-made fashion from Tuscany this is the other subject I'd like to talk about today. I knew you could do a lot of things using milk but those are all edible. This is completely new to me, I've never thought you can make fabric using milk.

What you're going to see in the video below is made from high concentrations of casein, which is a milk protein. This technique was patented by Antonio Ferretti (an Italian engineer and chemist) under the name of Lanital and it was used between 1937 and the end of WW2. Lanital is classified as a protein fiber and has a very similar molecular structure to wool.

According to the article published by livingit.euronews.com textiles account for a quarter of the environmental pollution in the region..

According to the video, Italy discarded an estimate 30 tones of milk, which is a shame. Using this technique all that milk can be saved and transformed into "milk fiber". I love it and hope to have a T-shirt one day or another clothing item.