Medal Gear: Turning Circuit Boards Into Olympic Gold

When Olympic athletes take the medal stand at this month’s XXI Winter Games, they’ll be receive recycled metals from end-of-life electronics. Canadian mining company Teck Resources was able to harvest the gold, silver, and bronze from the circuit boards of old computers and have it melted down and cast back into what are now the Olympic medals.

Motherboard headed to Vancouver to check out the making of this distinctive medals and interview the designers: Omer Arbel, an internationally acclaimed architect and industrial designer, and Corrine Hunt, a First Nations artist from the Raven Gwa’waina clan, of the Kwakwaka’wakw village on Vancouver Island.

The symbolism isn’t just fitting with the Olympics’ increasing moves toward sustainability; it’s a counterpoint to both the dangers of electronic waste and the heavy environmental impact that Canadian mining companies have had on landscapes in Canada and across the world.

But these recycled medals are a healthy reminder that we don’t need to pull resources out of the ground, and that the 11,000 computers we throw out every day in the United States alone are packed with valuable material that can be reused rather than left to rot the earth in e-waste dumps.