Quebec Firm Ditches Cyanide for Gold: Mining Gets a Cleaner Makeover

Here’s the thing about modern gold mining: it’s not your great-grandfather’s dirty, lawless Gold Rush anymore. Today’s operations are buried under layers of environmental permitting, ESG frameworks, and regulatory scrutiny that can take 8 to 20 years just to get approval in North America. It’s a necessary burden—protecting watersheds and wildlife matters—but it’s also expensive, bureaucratic, and resource-intensive for mining teams already juggling a thousand moving parts.

Enter Dundee Sustainable Technologies, a Quebec chemical firm that’s been quietly working on something that could genuinely change the game: a way to extract gold without cyanide, and to capture arsenic without creating environmental time bombs.

The company’s breakthrough comes in two pieces. First, their CLEVR gold circuit process swaps traditional cyanide leaching for sodium hypochlorite and sodium hypobromite—chemicals that work at room temperature and ambient pressure. The payoff? Contact time drops from 36 hours down to just 2 hours, and the whole thing runs in a closed loop where chemicals get recycled for reuse. No cyanide spills. No crisis waiting to happen.

The second innovation addresses arsenic, one of mining’s most persistent headaches. Their GlassLock process transforms arsenic into inert glass by mixing it with silica, recycled glass, and hematite. The result is a stable, insoluble product that’s far easier to remove and handle—and critically, doesn’t require those anxiety-inducing tailings ponds that sit around like small manmade lakes waiting for an earthquake or flood to turn them into disasters.

The technology isn’t theoretical anymore. Freegold Ventures Limited, developing the Golden Summit project in Alaska—which sits on roughly 30 million ounces of gold—has already put GlassLock to the test. The results were striking: 95% gold recovery, 98% of arsenic isolated as inert glass, and toxicity reduced from 7% to 0.17%. No cyanide needed. Gold concentrate direct-to-smelter quality.

This matters because it signals a shift. Mining will always be part of how we build civilization—we need copper for our wires, zinc for our pipes, gold for our electronics. But that doesn’t mean it has to look like it did a century ago. Dundee’s work shows that chemistry, when applied thoughtfully, can make extraction cleaner, faster, and less of a regulatory nightmare. For smaller mining teams and for the ecosystems around them, that’s not just progress—it’s essential.