New Brunswick explores metal recovery from century-old Nigadoo mine waste, US firm Regeneration to fund site cleanup with recovered metals

New Brunswick has signed an agreement with US-based Regeneration Enterprises to explore recovering metals from waste at the Nigadoo mine near Bathurst, a site shut down for nearly 50 years after producing copper, lead, zinc and silver. The announcement came Monday in Fredericton.

The province frames the deal as turning a liability into an asset: the Nigadoo tailings represent a $35 million environmental burden, and Regeneration, led by managing director Michael McPhie, intends to fund the site's restoration with revenue from recovered metals — meaning no public money for the cleanup and none for the exploration phase. Natural Resources Minister John Herron said the project offers a chance to unlock mineral wealth from a tailings facility while conducting remediation.

The appeal to environmentalists is explicit: the Conservation Council of New Brunswick said targeting an already damaged site is preferable to disturbing untouched land. Executive director Beverly Gingras said rehabilitation would be a positive outcome, while flagging the risk that reprocessing tailings ponds could disturb settled heavy metals and push them into watersheds.

Regeneration, working with Pabineau First Nation, expects to determine financial viability within a year; if approvals follow, processing could begin within two to three years. The critical-minerals push currently runs through either new mines with decade-long permitting timelines or Chinese processing. Nigadoo offers a third route: the ore was already broken, transported and abandoned — someone else paid the mining costs a century ago, and the waste has been sitting there ever since.