Today’s Solutions: April 16, 2026

With a little ingenuity, there’s a lot you can do with old electronic waste. That was shown at the 2016 Olympics in Rio where 30 percent of the silver and bronze in medals came from recycled electronic devices. Now organizers of the 2020 edition in Japan are looking to one up Rio by forging all winning athletes’ medals from citizen-donated electronic waste like discarded phones, digital cameras, and laptops. Officials said that they expect to collect enough obsolete electronic devices by the end of March to extract 30.3 kg of gold, 4,100 kg of silver and 2,700 kg of bronze, sufficient to make all of the medals for next summer’s Olympics and Paralympics.

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