How one company is making money – and jewelery – from abandoned mine sites

A Washington-based public benefit company called Regeneration wants to clean up lands and waterways in the Yukon, BC and Alaska — and make money doing it.

The project uses advanced technology to extract metals from waste materials at old mine sites.

The company has partnered with Apple, Tiffany & Co. and Canadian jewelery company Mejuri, which has agreed to purchase metals recovered from heritage 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 piles of sediment and waste rock along the banks of rivers and streams.

CEO Stephen D’Esposito says jewelry and technology companies are aware of environmental issues in the mining industry and are interested in being part of the solution.

“I contacted both Tiffany and Apple and said if I had an opportunity to do a project in Alaska, in the Yukon, in BC, where you go back to heritage sites – sometimes 100 years old – and see if there’s still an opportunity to extract gold 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 to extract any remaining gold from that waste, reforest the streams and replant vegetation – making the waters favorable again for species such as salmon and grayling.

“We’ve seen really amazing results,” said Carly Winn, biologist and Regeneration’s chief restoration officer. “Sometimes after a few days, we see anadromous fish arriving at a site.”

Growing interest in ethical, ‘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 making sure the jewelry they buy is ethically produced.

The project requires working with refineries willing to process small batches of gold and treat the material separately from other gold to ensure a “fully traceable product”.

“Being able to explore, you know, beautiful places, from the Yukon to Alaska, is an interesting challenge that the company is excited to take on,” McHugh said.

The first pieces of Mejuri’s “Salmon Gold” jewelery were released last year, with the latest line becoming available on October 13.

The project first started as a non-profit venture from the NGO Resolve. In 2021, he launched the start-up company Regeneration with even more ambitious goals.

Project continues to expand

Abandoned, polluting mines exist across Canada, and the remediation process is often incredibly expensive – and funded with taxpayers’ money.

“The mining industry is really unprepared to deal with its waste problem,” D’Esposito said. “It was set up to open new mines and finance new mines.”

Many old mine sites contain large amounts of metals and other pollutants, which can contaminate groundwater and affect nearby communities.

Regeneration is based on the idea that there is financial opportunity in that waste – that cleaning up can 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 is no financial model that the market accepts for how you prove you have what you have. What’s interesting is that mining waste is not the industry’s business.”

The company uses new technology and equipment to return to old mine sites and re-mine the toxic waste to clean and recover valuable metals.

“A lot of tailings and waste rocks may contain important minerals that we didn’t even notice in the ’50s,” said Olenka Forde, a hydrogeologist working on the project. “And the ability to extract those critical minerals did not exist.”

Forde said contemporary improvements often focus on water quality, with landscaping and ecological function an afterthought.

“There’s an opportunity to move that waste instead of a band-aid solution where you can treat the water and cap the waste. You can actually reprocess it,” he said.

Regeneration is working in Hadley, BC to help clean up the remains. Company also included Active discussions with First Nations and the federal government on several projects in the Yukon.

Sebastian Jones of the Yukon Conservation Society said that although questions remain whether improved sites will remain the same – placer mining in particular often involves new miners returning to the same sites again and again – it is refreshing to hear about a new approach to a century-old problem.

“It’s the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that drives positive change,” he said.