Innovation Fall 2026

Brucejack Mine in northern BC extracts gold and silver. P hoto : r uSS h eInL /S hutterStock

The result is a mine that increasingly resembles a highly integrated industrial process. Yesterday's waste, tomorrow's resource Historically, most mines were designed to recover a single

materials that have become significantly more valuable. Cobalt, germanium, indium, rare earth elements, silver, nickel, and residual copper can all remain trapped within old tailings streams. In some cases, operators are finding that yesterday's waste may contain tomorrow's critical minerals. Recovering those materials requires far more than simply digging up the tailings and running them through the same plant a second time. Many tailings deposits contain particles measured in microns rather than millimetres. According to Scott, these ultra-fine particles can behave very differently than freshly mined ore. Once particles become sufficiently small, electrostatic forces can become more influential than gravity, making traditional gravity-separation methods largely ineffective. “Reprocessing tailings can be very difficult,” he says.

commodity. A copper mine focused on copper. A nickel mine focused on nickel. Anything that couldn't be recovered economically using the available technology often ended up in the tailings facility. Today, however, many of those historic tailings deposits contain

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Fall 2026

Innovation