Medals at Tokyo olympics are recycled from discarded electronic equipment • Hacker News Board

Re: Medals at Tokyo olympics are recycled from discarded electronic equipment

#161

Post by panoramas4good » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 8:10 AM UTC

Frost1x wrote: post #91

I was curious about the medals, compositions, and materials costs so here's what I found. The dimensions of the medals are specified as a minimum of 60mm diameter by 3mm thick. For a cylinder, that's 8.482 cm^3 volume per medal, minimum. The 2020 Olympics has 339 events, each with a gold, silver, and bronze medal. Market price I found for gold as of this post is $58.56/g and silver is $0.82/g. Gold has a density of 1…

I love "napkin calculations"!

My numbers differ from yours (I get $801k for 1,842 medals) namely due to medal material composition: https://www.travelstatsman.com/02082021/614-gold-medals-will...

Re: Medals at Tokyo olympics are recycled from discarded electronic equipment

#162

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #156

CydeWeys wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, because precious metals mining is environmentally intensive, and by recovering some from trashed electronics instead you're having to do a little bit less mining. It's something like 31 tonnes of ore must be processed per ounce of gold yielded. That's a lot of energy, fuel, caustic chemicals, and polluting mine tailings.

Lots of resources are also used when mining trashed electronics for gold. Which "lots" is worse? I don't know, and neither do you.

No, way less resources are used in electronics recycling than in mining virgin resources. You're making a false equivalence here, or some weird kind of appeal to ignorance. Yes, it's true that some things are unknowable, but not this.

Re: Medals at Tokyo olympics are recycled from discarded electronic equipment

#163

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #162

BurningFrog wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of resources are also used when mining trashed electronics for gold. Which "lots" is worse? I don't know, and neither do you.

No, way less resources are used in electronics recycling than in mining virgin resources. You're making a false equivalence here, or some weird kind of appeal to ignorance. Yes, it's true that some things are unknowable, but not this.

If you have a source that quantifies this, I'd be happy to believe it.