Olympic Medals Made from Gold-plated Pure Silver, with 6 Grams of Gold

Taking part in the Olympic Games is every athlete’s dream and can be seen also as a promising opportunity, for which athletes could compete for gold, silver, and bronze medals in various sports.

Each of the gold, silver, and bronze medals of the Olympic Games are 85 millimeters in diameter and range in thickness from 7.7 mm to 12.1 mm.

The gold medal is in fact made from gold-plated pure silver, with around 6 grams of gold out of a total weight of 556 grams.

The silver medal is made from pure silver and weighs around 550 grams, while the bronze medal weighs approximately 450 grams and is in fact made from 95% copper and 5% zinc.

Currently, the gold medal's price would be worth nearly $800 if you melted it down, while the silver would be worth about $450 and the bronze around $5.

Indeed, the 4,000 gold, silver, and bronze medals at the Tokyo Games are made entirely from recycled metal – extracted from nearly 79,000 tons of used consumer electronics including laptops, games consoles, and digital cameras.

Electronic waste is seen as a mine of precious metals, in which 10% to 15% of precious and semi-precious metals can be extracted from the e-waste, according to a report released by the World Gold Council in Q1 2021.

Notably, Smartphones have precious metals such as gold, silver, and palladium; special metals such as cobalt, indium, and antimony; and metals such as copper and tin.

These are present in these advanced phones, but one tonne of mobile phones has as much as 340 kilograms of gold, 3.5 kilograms of silver, 140 grams of palladium, and 16 tons of copper, according to American Environment Institution.

Contributed by Ahmed Emam