A Washington-based public benefit company called Regeneration seeks to clean up lands and waterways in the Yukon, British Columbia and Alaska, and make money from it.
The project uses advanced technology to extract metals from waste materials in old mines.
The company has partnered with Apple, Tiffany and Co. and Canadian jewelry company Mejuri, which have agreed to purchase metals from legacy mines 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 piles of sediment and barren rock in and along streams and rivers.
CEO Stephen D’Esposito says jewelry and technology companies are aware of the environmental issues in the mining industry and are 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 British Columbia, to do a project where you go back to legacy sites (sometimes 100 years old) and see if there are still opportunities to mine gold and restore the site, would they be interested in purchasing the gold and helping fund the flow restoration?” D’Esposito said. “And the answer was yes.”
The goal was to extract the remaining gold from that waste and reshape streams and replant vegetation, making the waters once again hospitable to species such as salmon and grayling.
“We’ve seen really amazing results,” said Carly Vynne, biologist and restoration director for Regeneration. “Sometimes, days later, we’ve had anadromous fish approaching a site.”
Growing interest in ethical and “traceable” jewelry
Companies like Mejuri see the project as a way to meet their climate and sustainability goals.
“This is a real opportunity for us to be part of the restoration process,” said Holly McHugh, vice president of sustainability and social impact at 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 the rest of the gold to ensure a “fully traceable product.”
“Being able to track all the way to the Yukon, Alaska and, you know, beautiful places, is an interesting challenge that the company was excited to take on,” McHugh said.
Mejuri’s first “Salmon Gold” jewelry pieces were launched last year and the newest line will be available on October 13.
The project began as a non-profit venture of the NGO Resolve. In 2021 they launched the start-up Regeneración, with even more ambitious objectives.
The project continues to expand
Polluting abandoned mines exist across Canada, and the remediation process is often incredibly expensive and funded by taxpayer dollars.
“The mining industry is not really prepared to address the waste problem,” D’Esposito said. “It is designed to open new mines and finance new mines.”
Many old mines have significant amounts of tailings containing metals and other contaminants, which can contaminate groundwater and impact nearby communities.
Regeneration is based on the idea that there are financial opportunities in that waste: that cleanup could actually be profitable. But D’Esposito says the company still has a lot to prove.
“There is a model for how you do greenfield exploration projects, right? There is an accepted market mechanism to prove that you have gold, copper or cobalt in the ground,” he said. “But there is no financial model that the market accepts for how to prove what is in your tailings. Interestingly, it is not the industry’s business to extract waste.”
The company returns to old mines using newer technology and equipment and re-mines toxic waste to clean and recover valuable metals.
“A lot of tailings and waste rock may contain critical minerals that we didn’t even pay attention to in the 1950s,” 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, leaving landscaping and ecological function on the back burner.
“The opportunity is to move that waste instead of having a Band-Aid solution where you could treat the water and cover the waste. You can actually reprocess it,” he said.
Regeneration has been working in Hedley, BC to help clean up the 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 of the Yukon Conservation Society said that while questions remain about whether remediated sites will stay that way (in placer mining, especially, new miners return to the same sites over and over again), it’s refreshing to hear about a new approach to a centuries-old problem.
“This is the kind of innovative thinking that drives positive change,” he said.
