The 100 Million Ton Solution: Tapping the Hidden Copper Hoard in Tailings Dams


The energy transition's insatiable demand for metals is colliding with the brutal timelines and capital costs of traditional mining. The solution? A paradigm shift: viewing legacy waste not as a liability, but as the most strategic, permitted, and accessible "ore body" on the planet. We analyze the rise of remining. Three years ago, Anglo American’s CEO Duncan Winblad voiced a concern that has since become a consensus: "I genuinely don’t see where all of this copper is going to come from." The projected demand for the energy transition is staggering, and the decadeplus lead times for new mines are utterly misaligned with the urgency of netzero goals. The industry's answer is emerging from an unlikely place: its own past mistakes. Miners are turning to remining—the process of extracting valuable metals from old tailings dams. This isn't just recycling; it's a fundamental reevaluation of resource strategy. For Kaliandra Multiguna Group, this represents one of the most significant investment and operational shifts of the next decade.


Let's analyze the strategic layers of the remining revolution.

 1. The Strategic Imperative Barometer: Solving the TimePrice Paradox

The traditional mining model is broken for the energy transition's timeline.

  • The Time Paradox: Greenfield mines take 1015 years to permit and build. The world needs copper now to build grids, EVs, and renewables. Remining existing waste deposits can be brought online in a fraction of the time, as the "ore" is already excavated, crushed, and sitting in a permitted facility.
  • The Price Paradox: While copper demand projections are skyhigh, current prices remain volatile and often fail to justify the massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) of a new mine. Remining projects, with their lower upfront CAPEX (no digging required) and faster payback periods, can be economical at lower price thresholds.

 2. The Economic Barometer: The Value of a Liability

Tailings dams have long been viewed as pure environmental and financial liabilities—cost centers requiring perpetual management and security. Remining flips this script.

  • Monetizing Liabilities: A tailings dam is, in effect, a preprocessed stockpile. The immense cost of mining and milling has already been sunk. The only remaining cost is the reprocessing, which is being rapidly driven down by innovation in hydrometallurgy and bioleaching.
  • The Grade is Moot: While the grade is low (0.1%0.5%), the cost of extraction is orders of magnitude lower than traditional mining. The economic metric that matters is not grade, but net cost per pound of recovered metal.
  • The Hindustan Zinc Benchmark: Hindustan Zinc's investment in a 10 million ton per year reprocessing plant is a watershed moment. It signals that a major player has cracked the code on the economics, providing a blueprint for the entire industry.

 3. The ESG & Social License Barometer: The Ultimate Circular Play

Remining is arguably the most powerful ESG story in the resources sector.

  • Environmental Remediation: The process actively cleans up historical environmental liabilities. Once metals are extracted, the remaining material can often be redeposited in a more stable, less hazardous form or even used in construction, solving a longterm problem.
  • "Green" Metal: Copper or zinc recovered from waste will carry a significantly lower carbon footprint than metal from a new mine, appealing to manufacturers under pressure to clean up their supply chains.
  • Social License to Operate: Building a reprocessing plant on a brownfield site often faces less community opposition than developing a new greenfield mine, as it is seen as cleaning up rather than disrupting.

 4. The Innovation Barometer: The Technology Moonshot

The viability of remining hinges on a technological arms race to lower recovery costs.

  • Advanced Leaching Techniques: Innovations in targeted chemical and biological leaching can selectively extract metals without the need for massive energyintensive grinding and smelting.
  • SensorBased Sorting: Advanced sensors and AIpowered sorting technology can identify and concentrate valuable particles from the waste stream before any chemical processing begins, dramatically improving efficiency.
  • Modular Plant Design: Companies like Cobalt Blue are pioneering smaller, modular reprocessing plants that can be deployed at various tailings sites, reducing capital risk and allowing for scalability.


 The Kaliandra Multiguna Perspective: The New Resource Map

This shift changes everything for investors and operators:

  1. The Most Valuable Asset is a Permitted Tailings Facility: Companies with large, historical tailings deposits in stable jurisdictions are sitting on unrecognized strategic value.
  2. The New Mining Engineer is a Metallurgist: The key skillset is no longer just moving rock, but innovating in extraction chemistry and process efficiency at microscopic scales.
  3. Partnerships are Key: The future belongs to partnerships between mining majors (with the waste) and technology startups (with the extraction IP).
  4. Waste is a Design Flaw: The lesson for new mines is to design tailings facilities for future recovery, not just storage, creating a circular resource loop from day one.

The remining revolution proves that in the race to secure critical metals, the most forwardlooking strategy is to look backward. The waste of the 20th century is becoming the treasure of the 21st. At Kaliandra Multiguna Group, we help investors and companies identify value in unconventional assets, navigate the economics of circular business models, and build strategies for the new resource landscape.