The Tailings: Catalysing Collaboration Workshop in Toronto, co-hosted by the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) and Clareo, convened leaders from major mining companies, researchers, OEMs, and innovators to examine current challenges with mine tailings and explore strategic opportunities for tailings reduction, including reprocessing.
Mining generates an estimated 10–12 billion tonnes of tailings annually across more than 8,500 sites worldwide. Copper mining, in particular, is a significant contributor to this volume. With ore grades declining and electrification driving future demand, tailings are projected to grow rapidly. This trend is further amplified by community tensions and government mandates to onshore copper production. As companies expand existing operations or build new mines, tailings management is emerging as a critical bottleneck to meeting future materials demand.
While Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) has made important inroads into transparency, accountability and collaboration within the mining industry, innovating the mine-process value chain is critical in scaling operations.
This workshop aimed to move beyond dialogue, creating actionable, collaborative pathways for rethinking how mining companies, OEMs, governments, and communities approach tailings. Central to the discussions was the recognition that breakthrough technologies must be integrated into system-level solutions, not deployed as isolated fixes and ideally embedded into greenfield projects from the start.
The summary below captures key insights and opportunities identified during the workshop.
Scaling technical development
The technologies and approaches needed to transform tailings management exist in various stages of development but scaling them requires coordinated action across the entire mining ecosystem – mining companies, accelerators, OEMs, innovators and government agencies.
Split streaming separates benign rock from chemically active waste after milling. Pilots are being trialled from many angles that show 40% or more reductions in deposition costs and address key community concerns about water and land use. Some tailings reprocessing pilots have generated by-product revenues exceeding original mineral revenue. Yet many innovations struggle to bridge what participants called the ‘valley of death’ between laboratory validation and industrial deployment.
Defining promising collaborative pathways
The workshop distilled six interlinked challenges, each with clear problem statements and collaborative opportunities. These challenges represent the core areas where focused effort can yield transformative results.
- Open Mine, Open Value
Create a trusted data and knowledge-sharing platform to map tailings content and coordinate value recovery.
- Integrated solutions
Develop system-level solutions combining multiple technologies to maximize recovery and minimize waste.
- Scaling from Idea to Implementation (Scale-Up Fast Track)
Bridge the gap between research and industrial deployment with aligned R&D, pilot support, and practical scale-up roadmaps.
- (Future-proof) greenfield projects
Embed tailings-smart design, rigorous metrics, and closure accountability in new mines from day one.
- Data and standards
Standardize tailings data collection and leverage AI to make credible recovery estimates and business cases.
- Eliminate tailings in the future and build financial ecosystems needed to de-risk and accelerate innovation
Drive the industry toward tailings elimination by rapidly exploring and deploying next-generation processing methods, while unlocking funding, tax incentives, and collaborative pilots to share risk and accelerate adoption of bold solutions.
The future is up to us
However, the workshop’s most important contribution may be recognising that no entity can solve this alone. The transformation of these pathways requires unprecedented collaboration among technology developers, mining operators, communities, regulators, and financial institutions.
The payoff could be substantial. Working on tailings creates a strong total value proposition across multiple areas including lower liability costs, more recovered materials, better community relations, and faster permitting. When safety, social acceptance, and resource recovery need to align, innovation becomes essential to unlock the full potential.
None of these steps forward are simple. They require whole-of-industry coordination, reflection and bold progress. As the industry moves forward through collaboration, transparent data sharing, and whole-system design, tailings can become a bridge to a more responsible and resilient mining future.
