Organizers say enough home electronic appliances and cellphones have been collected to make about 5,000 medals prior to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

Almost 50,000 tons of small appliances, in addition to more than 5 million mobile phones, have been donated, according to the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Medals have started to be fashioned through using the extracted metal since last month.

Almost two years have passed since the committee started to call for placing recycling devices into boxes set up nationwide under the world’s first-such project.

Electronic devices including mobile phones contain plenty of metal. A mobile phone has about 0.05 gram of gold, 0.26 gram of silver and 12.6 grams of bronze.

A personal computer contains 10 times more gold than in a mobile phone, according to a provisional calculation.