A practising engineer documenting a global shift.
"I kept asking the same question on site: why are we treating this material like a problem to be stored, when the rest of the world is learning to treat it like a resource?"
I'm a civil engineer who spent four years working in tailings management at a consultancy. I worked on geotechnical assessments, storage facility designs, and closure planning — the full lifecycle of tailings infrastructure.
That work gave me a ground-level view of how the industry thinks about mine waste: as a liability. Something to be contained, monitored, and eventually closed. The question of what else it could be rarely came up.
That question sent me down a rabbit hole. I started finding projects scattered across South Africa, Brazil, Finland, Australia, and Kazakhstan where engineers were doing exactly that — recovering gold from century-old tailings dams, turning copper slag into geopolymer bricks, extracting rare earths from uranium tailings. The evidence was there. It just wasn't being talked about in one place.
So I built this platform. Not as an expert, but as a practitioner who wanted to document what's possible. The 20 case studies here represent real projects, real data, and real outcomes. The blog is where I try to make sense of the technology behind them.
If you're working in tailings management, mining engineering, or sustainable resources — I'd genuinely like to connect.