Hecla’s management of tailings follows international tailings standards and policies, while continually innovating to find feasible solutions.
We strive to reduce waste generation at all stages of the mining process. All sites have active programs for reuse, recycling, and recovery of hazardous and non-hazardous materials such as scrap metal, batteries, antifreeze, used oil, paints/solvents, and cardboard.
Hecla’s Tailings Management Program is designed to ensure that all of our operations implement best practices and risk-based approaches to managing mining waste. In addition, our internal tailings management standard provides company-wide procedures and protocols governing the safe and environmentally responsible design, construction, operation, and closure of tailings storage facilities.
Hecla has developed a partnership with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to study the economic potential of recovering and re-processing critical minerals from mine tailings. Minerals in our tailings at Greens Creek include silver, gold, zinc, lead, copper, nickel, arsenic, barium, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, gallium, germanium, manganese, and vanadium.
Hecla was an early developer of the dry stack method of tailings management at our Greens Creek operation, and this method is utilized at our Keno Hill site as well. In this method, tailings are filter-pressed to a low moisture content and then trucked and placed into a “dry stack” that does not dam or impound water. This method minimizes the tailings surface footprint, lessening the impact on nearby wildlife habitat, while also eliminating the storage of free-standing water with tailings and significantly reducing the consequences of failure.
In 2024, we generated 4,173 metric tonnes of waste. We disposed of approximately 2,446 metric tonnes of non-hazardous and hazardous waste and recycled 1,727 metric tonnes (41%) that otherwise would have been disposed of as waste.
