By Iryna Fedets, URN Correspondent
Mountains of red mud, mine tailings, coal ash and metallurgical slag sprawl across Ukraine’s old industrial regions, the residue of decades of mining, metals production and Soviet-era heavy industry.
Piled into dumps and tailings facilities and long treated as an environmental burden, that waste is now drawing attention for what may be hidden inside it: rare earths and other critical minerals increasingly prized by Western economies.
Researchers are finding valuable materials across those waste streams — from scandium and yttrium in iron-ore tailings to rare earths in red mud and titanium-processing waste.
