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7 results for “Tailings” in Industry
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
…als meet air and water, and can run for centuries without intervention. · Upstream-raised tailings dams — built on their own deposited waste — carry the worst failure record and are now banned or being phased out in several jurisdictions. · Closure liabilities are supposed to be…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
…ining does offer is a much lower environmental cost per gram, no new land disturbance, no tailings facility and no perpetual water treatment. That is the honest case for it. It will not replace mining, and framing it that way sets it up to be judged against a target it cannot hit…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…des no conventional gold mine could match, and do so with none of the overburden removal, tailings management or multi-decade closure liability of a primary mine. · The constraint on scaling this further is not technology but collection. The gold in a smartphone is only recoverab…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
Counterfeiting gold is not about making something that looks right. It is about defeating a specific test, and the industry's defences are an escalating conversation between forgers and instruments. ·…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the metal i…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
Somewhere between a mine's doré bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's mar…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
Roughly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most selle…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
