I can speak to one example in the Baie Verte Peninsula. There was an open-pit mine, and the open pit was reaching the point of exhaustion. The company was interested in bringing other deposits, both from the local area and from Nova Scotia, into their mill. They proposed that they use the pit as a tailings facility. That's probably not so much an innovation as it is a practicality—looking at the reality of what you have on the ground and utilizing that to your benefit.
Second, the company entered into an agreement with a number of other partners to sell their waste rock as aggregate into the Carolinas. That's another way of getting value from what you have by thinking a little bit beyond the box. Sometimes it's a little bit about being creative.
Looking ahead at the mining industry as a whole, relative to other extractive industries, you start with a large amount of land. Let's say you need the whole table area here to do exploration. You get down to some targets, and you find that you need to narrow it down and narrow it down. Your footprint, at the end of the day, can be small, but we believe we can, as an industry, do better internally over time to improve our processes—Canada being a leader in this area—and leverage our technologies to better ends.
Digital mining is another area where we need to step up a little bit further. We also need to look at the benefit of what we're going to do for the world in terms of the low-carbon economy. Minerals are very much necessary for the electrification of vehicles and for changes in how we approach a low-carbon economy. We're very encouraged on that aspect.
We've done some things in this province. It's interesting that the mining sector can be a little bit slow to adopt. We had a program here locally called GeoExplore. When it was first rolled out, people were a little bit hesitant to get engaged, but once one or two companies got engaged and people got talking, the next thing we knew, we had 27 projects being pursued.
We have good relationships with the university community, with the College of the North Atlantic and others, to leverage our activities in this regard. We're very proud of that.