A Washington-based public benefit company called Regeneration is looking to clean up land and waterways in the Yukon, B.C. and Alaska – and make money doing it.
The project uses advanced technology to extract metals from waste material at old mine sites.
The company has partnered with Apple, Tiffany and Co., and Canadian jewelry company Mejuri, which have agreed to buy metals sourced from legacy mine sites and help fund restoration efforts.
The project began more than a decade ago with a focus on sites in the North, where decades of placer mining have left heaps of sediment and waste rock in and along streams and rivers.
CEO Stephen D’Esposito says jewelry and technology companies are aware of environmental issues in the mining industry and interested in being part of the solution.
“I approached both Tiffany and Apple and said if I could find opportunities in Alaska, in the Yukon, in B.C., to do a project where you go back into legacy sites – sometimes 100 years old – and see if there’s still opportunity to get gold out and restore the site, would you be interested in buying the gold and helping fund stream restoration?” D’Esposito said. “And the answer was yes.”
The aim was both to extract remaining gold from that waste and re-form streams and replant vegetation – making waters hospitable again for species like salmon and grayling.
“We’ve seen really amazing results,” said Carly Vynne, a biologist and chief restoration officer with Regeneration. “Sometimes days later, we’ve had anadromous fish coming up to a site.”
Growing interest in ethical, ‘traceable’ jewelry
Companies like Mejuri see the project as a way to meet their climate and sustainability targets.
“This is a real opportunity for us to be part of the restoration process,” said Holly McHugh, vice-president of sustainability and social impact with Mejuri.
McHugh said customers are increasingly interested in ensuring the jewelry they buy is made ethically.
The project has required working with refineries willing to process small batches of gold and process the material separately from other gold to ensure “fully traceable product.”
“Being able to trace all the way back to the Yukon, to Alaska, to, you know, beautiful places, is an interesting challenge the company has been excited to take,” said McHugh.
The first pieces of “Salmon Gold” jewelry from Mejuri were released last year, with the newest line becoming available Oct. 13.
The project first started as a non-profit enterprise from NGO Resolve. In 2021, they launched the start-up company Regeneration, with even more ambitious goals.
Project continues to expand
Abandoned, polluting mines exist all over Canada, and the remediation process is often incredibly expensive – and funded by taxpayer dollars.
“The mining industry is not really set up to tackle its waste problem,” said D’Esposito. “It’s set up to open up new mines and finance new mines.”
Many old mine sites have significant amounts of tailings containing metals and other pollutants, which can contaminate groundwater and affect nearby communities.
Regeneration is founded on the idea that there is financial opportunity in that waste – that cleaning up could actually be profitable. But D’Esposito says the company still has a lot to prove.
“There’s a model for how you do new greenfield exploration projects, right? There’s an accepted market mechanism for how you demonstrate that you have gold or copper or cobalt in the ground,” he said. “But there’s no financial model that the market accepts for how you prove what’s in your tailings. Interestingly, it’s not the business of the industry to mine waste.”
The company returns to old mine sites using newer technology and equipment and re-mines toxic waste in order to both clean up and recover valuable metals.
“A lot of tailings and waste rock can have critical minerals we didn’t even pay attention to in the 50s,” said Olenka Forde, a hydrogeologist working on the project. “And the ability to extract those critical minerals didn’t exist.”
Forde said contemporary remediation often focuses on water quality, with landscaping and ecological function an afterthought.
“The opportunity is moving that waste instead of having a band-aid solution where you might treat the water and cover the waste up. You can actually reprocess it,” she said.
Regeneration has been working in Hedley, B.C. to help clean up tailings. The company is also in active discussions with First Nations and the federal government on a number of projects in the Yukon.
Sebastian Jones with the Yukon Conservation Society said while questions remain about whether remediated sites will remain that way – placer mining especially often sees new miners returning to the same sites over and over – it’s refreshing to hear of a new approach to a century-old problem.
“This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that drives positive change,” he said.
