Exploring BC’s Potential for Mine Waste and Cleantech to Support a Circular Economy
Foresight Canada partnered with Geoscience BC, Arca, and New Gold to fund a desktop study by Purple Rock examining BC’s readiness to recover value from mine waste. The study leveraged existing provincial assets (mills, clean power, infrastructure, and skilled labour) to produce a detailed map of waste rock and tailings. This tool supports cleantech adoption in mining, positions BC to supply critical minerals to global markets, and advances reconciliation through sustainable economic development.
Access Purple Rock’s mine waste and tailings report and data.
Turning Waste into Opportunity
Canada has the potential to be a global leader in the responsible supply of critical minerals—the building blocks essential for clean energy, defence, and advanced manufacturing supply chains. However, experts warn that future supply may not keep pace with rapidly growing demand. For several critical minerals, especially copper and lithium, the International Energy Agency anticipates that mine supply from announced projects is expected to meet only about 70% of copper demand and 50% of lithium demand by 2030.
Canada faces similar challenges, requiring an estimated $30 billion in new domestic investment over the next 15 years, while global demand would require approximately $65 billion in Canadian investment over the same period. Reflecting this urgency, the federal government’s 2025 Budget positions critical minerals as a cornerstone of Canada’s Climate Competitiveness Strategy, introducing new investments, tax incentives, and partnerships to accelerate exploration, processing, and recycling.
An emerging opportunity lies in mine waste. Materials historically considered uneconomic to process are increasingly recognized as sources of untapped critical minerals at both legacy and active mine sites. Reprocessing waste rock and tailings offers clear environmental and economic benefits: existing materials are already pre-crushed, allowing operators to avoid energy-intensive comminution, which accounts for a significant share of mining energy use, while also reducing the need for new greenfield development and associated land disturbance.
This “waste-to-opportunity” approach has gained momentum globally and domestically. Internationally, companies such as Rio Tinto are investing in research to reprocess legacy mine waste. In Canada, initiatives such as Exterra in Quebec are focused on extracting valuable metals from asbestos tailings. At the federal level, Natural Resources Canada’s Mining Value from Waste Initiative is advancing methods to recover critical minerals from legacy and active mine sites while reducing environmental risks. The Critical Minerals Research, Development and Demonstration Program has allocated CAD $246.3 million since 2021 to advance processing technologies and innovative recovery methods. This funding supports tangible results, including tailings-recovery projects in Ontario that successfully extract battery-grade metals. Together with broader value-chain investments, these initiatives underscore strong and growing federal momentum behind waste-to-value strategies.
How BC is Well-Equipped
BC’s mining sector, along with existing mills, clean power, transportation, and innovators, is well-positioned to lead under this national strategy. By aligning with federal initiatives, BC can create economic, environmental, and societal benefits while strengthening Canada’s critical minerals supply chain.
Understanding the location and composition of mine waste piles in BC is the essential first step for these recovery efforts, along with a solid understanding of the existing power and transportation infrastructure and the social and physical access to the piles.
The Transforming Waste Rock report leverages BC’s existing assets and socio-economic context to outline and support this opportunity, including:
- Smelters & Mills: Key operations include Rio Tinto Alcan’s aluminum smelter in Kitimat, Teck Resources’ Trail zinc and lead smelter, and Nicola Mining’s Merritt Mill for third-party gold and silver processing.
- Clean Power: BC has 121 Independent Power Producers generating energy from biogas, biomass, hydro, solar, wind, and other clean sources.
- Transportation: Efficient logistics are crucial for moving mined and refined products. Challenges such as port and rail congestion and limited road infrastructure highlight the need for improvements, including upgrades like the Northwest BC Highway Corridor.
- Labour: BC offers diverse pathways for mining careers, though challenges include an aging workforce, low youth worker enrollment, and underrepresentation of women and minorities.
- Mineral Innovators: BC is home to companies advancing mineral processing, waste reclamation, and water management technologies.
Recommendations
- Advocate for mining organizations to allocate funding for mine waste studies to better understand the composition and grade of waste mine piles. Leveraging existing exploration funding can help assess the feasibility of processing these waste piles.
- Investigate Indigenous communities near “heat-mapped” clusters of mine waste piles of interest to explore the potential for co-development of a mine waste processing project, which may be of importance to them in addressing their concerns.
- Research in greater detail which current mining operations with mills would be candidates for additional mine waste processing.
- Research specific requirements needed for mining innovators to apply their technologies to the processing of mine waste in order to better understand the conditions and needs for application.
- Further explore GIS data and develop data layers that allow users to navigate information such as power availability and transportation infrastructure in relation to neighbouring waste rock piles.
