Tailings
The Hidden Mine No One Operates
More than 280 billion tonnes of mine tailings sit in storage worldwide.
Every year, mining adds 10–12 billion tonnes more.
Less than 1% is ever reprocessed.
And inside these “waste” reservoirs are billions of dollars in unrecovered metals:
- REEs trapped in gangue
- Entrained organics
- Lost reagents
- Off-spec precipitates
- Oxides discharged due to undetected process drift
The industry isn’t leaving pennies on the floor; it’s losing entire mines worth of revenue through slow, compounding losses that are difficult to see with traditional tools
Tailings evolve chemically, mineralogically, physically every hour.
But the industry treats them as:
- A liability
- A storage problem
- A long-term environmental risk
- A line item to fence and forget
Meanwhile, global pressure keeps rising:
- Over 350 tailings dam failures recorded worldwide since the 1960s.
- Regulators in the U.S., EU, and Latin America tightening audits.
- ESG penalties increasing for untreated recoverable by product losses.
- Manufacturers demanding ethically sourced, low-footprint rare earths.
The world needs the metals inside these waste streams, but the industry has lacked decision-grade visibility to act on them at scale
Waste Becomes Feedstock
Reclaim helps operators understand the recovery potential within tailings streams and evaluate reprocessing opportunities with greater confidence
It provides a more dependable basis for tailings-related decisions than traditional estimation method
Offers insight into:
- Elemental recovery potential
- Oxidation and leaching profiles
- Phase and mineral distribution
- Reagent degradation over time
- True economic value of each waste stream
- Which streams should be reprocessed — and how
The Global Math Is Brutal
Across rare earth operations globally:
- Tailings losses average 5–15% of all produced value.
- Entrained REE concentrations commonly range 1,000–8,000 ppm
- Many sites discard $0.5M–$5M per day in recoverable value.
- Water use and reagent burn are 2–3× higher than required for optimal recovery.
Reclaim Engine brings financial visibility to recoverable value long treated as waste
Operational Foresight, Not Reporting
Operational risk accumulates when signals are seen too late to act
- Real-time recovery gains
- Reprocessing scenarios with exact economics
- CO₂ and water usage reductions
- Precisely estimated payback periods
This is the shift from managing waste to realizing its economic value
From Liability to Profit Center
Tailings aren’t the end of the chain.
They’re the beginning of a second one.
Reclaim Engine applies to:
- Slimes
- Off-spec materials
- Entrained organics
- Settling underflow
- Historical tailings
- Scavenger rejects
This brings visibility to reclaimable value within tailings streams.
