Recovering critical minerals and metals from Canadian mine tailings for renewable energy transition: Resources potential and reprocessing challenges

The global clean energy transition has driven a surge in the demand for critical minerals. To support critical mineral supply chains, the Canadian government established a Critical Minerals Strategy that encourages the recovery of critical minerals from mining wastes. Centuries of mining activities in Canada has left substantial volumes of tailings, representing a major yet largely underutilized secondary resource. This paper presents a systematic review of publicly available literature, government and institutional reports, and industrial disclosures to evaluate the resource potential of Canadian mine tailings and related reprocessing technologies. Representative case studies of tailings reprocessing across Canada are discussed, highlighting the great opportunity of recovering Li, Ni, Co, Cu, REEs, Ti, Zr, and Nb from diverse tailings sources. The broad interrelated challenges of tailings reprocessing and valorization are critically examined from technical, environmental, social, economic, and regulatory perspectives. It is concluded that tailings reprocessing brings significant opportunities for resource recovery and waste remediation, delivering environmental and social benefits while requiring limited additional energy consumption. The implementation of tailings reprocessing projects requires coordinated policy and regulatory incentives in infrastructure development, R&D, and pilot-to-commercial transition. Above all, the development of hybrid, tailored technical flowsheets of integrating innovative physical beneficiation techniques and advanced chemical extractive metallurgical methods can improve process economics of recovering critical minerals from mine tailings.