A Washington based company called Regeneration is cleaning up abandoned mine sites across the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alaska by extracting valuable metals from toxic waste, then selling the recovered gold to Tiffany and Co., Apple, and more. The project tackles a massive problem that typically falls on taxpayers to fix, as abandoned mines litter Canada and leak pollutants into waterways for decades after operations shut down. CEO Stephen D’Esposito started the effort over a decade ago by asking major companies if they would buy gold recovered from century old mine sites to help fund stream restoration, and both Tiffany and Apple said yes. The company focuses on sites in the North where placer mining left huge piles of sediment choking streams, then reforms those waterways and replants vegetation to make them livable again for salmon and grayling, with fish sometimes returning within days according to chief restoration officer Carly Vynne.
What started as a nonprofit effort became the startup Regeneration in 2021, allowing more ambitious expansion plans based on the idea that cleanup could actually turn a profit rather than drain public funds. The company returns to old sites with newer technology that can extract critical minerals nobody paid attention to in the 1950s, reprocessing the toxic waste to both clean it up and recover valuable metals that were missed or ignored decades ago. Companies like Mejuri see producing jewelry from abandoned mines as a way to hit sustainability targets while appealing to customers who care about ethical sourcing, releasing their first Salmon Gold collection last year with a new line launched in October. If Regeneration can prove this model works at scale across Canada’s thousands of contaminated sites, it could fundamentally transform how we think about industrial waste and environmental responsibility by making cleanup profitable instead of treating it as a taxpayer burden.
