Reprocessing gold tailings for old mines with more effective and robust methods has been tried recently. I remember looking into it but IIRC the few examples I found had all folded. I really do hope we do get to the point where we can reprocess almost any solid mass into useable compounds, though.

I think the trick will be if you can extract funding from the public for remediation and make your profit off of the materials recovered from said tailings.

The thing is now you’re rewarding an industry for making a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.