Sasquatch Resources is targeting roughly 300,000 tonnes of sulphide-bearing waste rock at the historic Mount Sicker copper-gold district on Vancouver Island, where legacy piles with a neutralisation potential of 0.2 and open shafts up to 200 feet deep continue to generate acid runoff and physical hazards. Modern sampling of the surface waste has returned average grades of about 2 g/t gold plus copper, silver and zinc, and the company plans to crush and process the material using density and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) ore-sorting in a closed-loop, reagent-free circuit. Because the project involves large-scale reprocessing without new mining, Sasquatch is working with regulators to craft a bespoke permitting pathway that could be replicated across an estimated 2,000 legacy mine sites in British Columbia.

Mining companies are redrawing 2026 technology roadmaps around cloud ERP platforms such as SAP, shifting from legacy spreadsheets and siloed systems to a single financial and operational backbone spanning finance, capital management, procurement, supply chain and maintenance. Clean-core architectures with extensibility and open interfaces are being used to plug in geology asset management, environmental monitoring and safety applications without heavy customisation, cutting technical debt and easing upgrades. With harmonised master data and automated consolidations delivering near real-time views of cash, capex and asset performance, miners can support AI-driven predictive maintenance and tighter working-capital control across multi-jurisdictional portfolios.

Lynas Rare Earths has produced its first on-spec samarium oxide at its Malaysian plant, making it the only non-Chinese supplier of this heavy rare earth used in high-performance magnets for electronics and aerospace. The A$180 million plant expansion is designed to separate up to 5,000 tonnes per annum of heavy rare earth feedstock, with initial capacity for samarium, gadolinium, dysprosium, terbium, yttrium and lutetium expected within two years. Lynas has also signed a four-year binding letter of intent to supply light and heavy rare earth oxides to the US Department of Defense.