Waste from mining includes tailings, waste rock, and legacy sites that carry long-term environmental and financial risk. These materials are more than stored byproducts; they represent ongoing liability, regulatory pressure, and untapped value across the industry.

In Episode 53 of Mine EX-Plorers, Jack Kellner, co-founder of Canary Waves and a member of KB&G Consulting, explores what it really takes to address waste from mining. From reprocessing tailings and navigating policy reform to uncovering operational insight hidden in radio chatter, the episode argues that progress depends not only on technology but on better structure, smarter incentives, and listening to operators.

Understanding Waste From Mining — Tailings, Liability, and Lost Value

Waste from mining does not disappear when production stops. It remains in tailings facilities, waste rock piles, and legacy abandoned sites, creating environmental and financial liabilities for decades. The barrier to action is rarely just technical. More often, it comes down to structure and accountability.

What determines whether waste from mining gets addressed is often liability. Jack emphasizes that projects must consider “the potential liabilities that exist,” and that reducing those liabilities can reshape overall project value. He also notes that innovation is not only about recovery technology, but about “how you structure the project, the commercial terms.” Without rethinking incentives and ownership of risk, tailings stay in place, along with the lost value they represent.

Rethinking Waste From Mining Through Structure and Partnerships

Mining waste is a liability challenge. Jack explains that Regeneration reframes the question by asking, “What would a significant improvement look like and how could that reduce potential liabilities going forward?” When liability is reduced, value is created. Project economics begin to reflect not just recovered metals, but long-term risk removed from the balance sheet.

That shift requires alignment. “You've got to be really careful about how you approach those conversations,” Jack notes, emphasizing transparency with regulators, operators, and the public. Regeneration also supports policy efforts like the Good Samaritan Mining Act while working with partners willing to “pay a premium” for responsibly sourced metals. When policy, liability reduction, and market demand converge, waste from mining becomes financially viable to address.

Why Innovation in Mining Adoption Is Slow

Innovation in mining is not limited by ideas, but by how change is introduced and accepted at the site level. 

At mining sites, tools are judged on practicality, not presentation. As Jack says, “what they don't need is another dashboard for the operations room.” While there could be a lot of enthusiasm at the C-suite level, that energy often fades before it reaches operators. In some cases, “there could be hostility when you're going to try to implement or integrate at a site if you don't have that relationship built with the operation.” Mandates rarely translate into lasting adoption.

That is why bottom-up credibility matters. Mining sites run on experience and pattern recognition. Tools imposed without buy-in are seen as friction. Instead, the focus must be to “get some champions within the organization.” Adoption sticks when it grows from the ground up and when the people building the technology understand operations firsthand.

The Hidden Data Inside Waste From Mining Operations

Waste from mining is managed on a shift-by-shift basis through communication. Yet most of that communication disappears into static.

Waste management and tailings facilities rely on:

• Radio communication: Real-time coordination between operators, supervisors, and maintenance crews across pits, tailings dams, and processing areas.

• Field coordination: On-the-ground updates about equipment positioning, access routes, and changing site conditions.

• Maintenance calls: Immediate reporting of equipment failures, pressure issues, overheating, and breakdown risks.

• Safety reporting: Hazard alerts, near misses, and rapid response coordination during incidents.

Every one of these calls contains operational intelligence.

The overlooked data stream: two-way radio chatter

As Jack explains, two-way radio systems are everywhere, yet the technology itself is largely unchanged. The chatter is recorded, stored, and only revisited when something goes wrong. Canary Waves asks a simple but powerful question: why wait? “Canary Waves is not going to solve your problem. Your operators are already solving the problem. We're just giving you the tool to listen to them.”

How incidents are investigated after the fact — but rarely analyzed proactively

The company’s origin story proves the point. During an incident review, investigators pulled an MP3 file of radio chatter to reconstruct what happened. Jack remembers thinking, “Why are we looking at this right now?” The insight was obvious: the data already existed.

“The operators already know what’s wrong. We just haven’t been listening to them.”

Turning waste from mining into actionable intelligence requires systems that process this data stream in real time. Canary Waves, together with partners like KB&G Consulting, has the capability to co-produce technology for advanced data processing that makes that listening operationally viable.

From Radio Noise to Real Insight — KB&G's Canary Waves Approach

Mining does not lack data. It lacks structure around the data it already has. Two-way radios run constantly across pits, plants, and tailings facilities. The challenge is not collection. It is an interpretation.

What Canary Waves does:

• Denoising radio chatter: Cleans scratchy two-way audio so conversations can be processed accurately.

• Speech recognition: Converts radio calls into text using automatic speech recognition models.

• Site-specific vocabulary: Loads models with mining terminology and site-specific language so context is preserved.

• Context-aware AI analysis: Uses large language models to identify trends, risks, and operational signals in real time.

The goal is not complexity. It is clarity.

Not another dashboard — a data translation layer

As Jack explains, “what they don't need is another dashboard for the operations room.” Instead of adding another screen, Canary Waves works primarily in the background. It acts as a translation layer between raw radio chatter and existing systems, preparing structured insights that decision-makers can use.

Categories of insight

• Safety hazards: Identifies risky conditions or escalating situations during live operations.

• Operational inefficiencies: Surfaces delays and coordination gaps that affect production.

• Maintenance triggers: Flags equipment issues before they cascade into extended downtime.

• Environmental events: Detects communication related to site conditions that require attention.

Real-world examples

• Downtime reduction: As Jack notes, the system does more than log idle time. It captures the context behind it. Rather than simply recording “14 seconds of hang time,” CanaryWaves can surface why it happened based on the radio conversation, helping teams address root causes instead of just tracking delays.

• Identifying recurring delays: By analyzing radio traffic over time, the platform reveals repeated coordination issues or congestion points that operators regularly discuss, but that rarely appear in formal reports.

• Triggering maintenance before escalation: Equipment issues are often called in before a formal work order is created. CanaryWaves flags those early signals, enabling faster follow-up before small problems become costly downtime.

“Your operators are already solving the problem,” Jack notes. “We're just giving you the tool to listen to them.”

Why Safety Is the Entry Point — But Not the End Goal

As Jack explains, it was an “obvious initial entry point just to develop the product.” Sites are naturally receptive to tools that can reduce harm and improve response times. But the value does not stop there.

Once communication data is analyzed, it begins to expose more than hazards. It reveals operational inefficiencies and maintenance gaps. Canary Waves is designed to connect those insights to fleet systems and work order platforms, helping reduce downtime and prevent escalation. Safety opens the door. Operational performance keeps it open.

The Future of Waste From Mining — Listening, Not Just Reprocessing

Reprocessing tailings is one path forward for waste from mining. But as the podcast episode makes clear, structure and intelligence matter just as much as metallurgy. Jack notes that innovation is not only technical but about “how you structure the project, the commercial terms.” Policy alignment, liability reduction, and better incentives reshape what is economically possible.

At the operational level, the shift is from reactive to proactive. Reflecting on an incident review, Jack recalls thinking, “Why are we looking at this right now?” The future of waste from mining depends on listening earlier and using data before problems escalate.

How Canary Waves Helps Mines Turn Waste From Mining Into Actionable Intelligence

Canary Waves, a product of KB&G Consulting and co-founded by Jack Kellner, transforms unstructured two-way radio chatter into structured, decision-ready insight. Using speech recognition, site-specific language models, and contextual AI analysis, it turns scratchy audio into searchable data that reveals operational blind spots, recurring delays, safety risks, and leading indicators in real time. It works passively with existing radio systems, requiring no new hardware or behavior change from frontline operators.

By analyzing daily communication as it happens, Canary Waves helps reduce downtime, improve safety performance, and strengthen environmental response. It integrates with fleet management and maintenance systems rather than replacing them and is built for mine sites, not hype-driven tech rollouts. Ready to hear what your operators are already telling you? 

Book a demo or run a proof of concept today.

Final Thought

Waste from mining is not just tailings stored behind dams. It is also unleveraged data moving through your site every shift, hidden in daily communication and operational decisions. 

In Mine EX-Plorers — EP53: Mining the Waste: Tailings, Tech & the Next Layer of Data with Jack Kellner of Canary Waves, we explore how smarter structure, better listening, and operator-built technology can reshape how mines manage risk and performance. The insights are already there. Watch now.