Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today to discuss this super important and critical aspect of the circular economy.
Geomega is a developer of innovative processing technologies. We are focused on extracting metals from existing and new sources of material.
The demand for traditional industrial metals, such as steel, copper and aluminum, is constantly increasing due to new manufacturing and technological developments and, of course, population growth. Traditional recycling of these metals or simple-stream recycling, such as consumer end-of-life products and manufacturing waste recycling, has been developed over the last 100 years and is well established in Canada and worldwide.
On the other hand, the demand for critical and strategic metals is only starting to grow and simple-stream recycling is not yet developed or only starting to be developed worldwide. This is one example where Canada has a significant opportunity to become a global leader in metals recycling using innovative, sustainable technologies. Canada has already started investing in this field and should continue doing so to help its industries develop and establish a significant global presence in the circular economy for critical and strategic metals.
The developments of Geomega are specifically focused in this field, where we are working on building the first rare earth magnet recycling facility outside of Asia right here in Quebec, Canada. The magnets to be recycled will be sourced from end-of-life wind turbines, electric vehicles, MRI machines, manufacturing waste and many more applications from all over the world. They'll be processed into rare earth oxides here in Canada.
Contrary to the recycling of simple streams, for both traditional metals and critical and strategic metals another major metal recycling opportunity for Canada is from complex streams such as industrial and mining waste. These complex streams include bauxite residues from alumina production, electric arc furnace dust from steel recycling, iron ore tailings, copper and nickel tailings, niobium tailings and many more.
Traditionally, many of these complex streams have been sent to long-term storage in waste and tailings facilities. Today, due to the increased demand for both traditional metals and critical and strategic metals and the push for more sustainable environmental practices, these complex streams have more value than ever.
Once processed with the right technology, new metal streams will be developed to increase revenues of companies, tailings facilities will be reduced while freeing up space for other developments and many new high-skilled jobs can be created. Canada has already started investing in this avenue and needs to continue doing so while this field is still in its infancy.
Geomega has an active program of R and D projects focusing on complex streams such as bauxite residues from alumina production and other waste types, where new streams of iron, alumina, rare earth, scandium and other metals can be produced.
I'm here to answer your questions if you would like to learn more about what other opportunities can be exploited or developed while this field is just being born.