Value should be the final outcome

Warren Nelson

, CEO & Co-Founder

September 29, 2026

Newsletter · Published monthly on LinkedIn

For most of my career, environmental remediation has been built around a fairly simple question: How do we get rid of the problem?

Turning waste into value

I like to ask a better one.

How do we turn waste into value?

A contaminated material does not necessarily have to become waste or something destined for a landfill. Sometimes what we call waste still contains something useful. If we can remove the contamination, recover what has value and return the remaining material to productive use, we have created a very different outcome.

Resource recovery at Nelson

A contaminated material may still contain something useful. Where treatment is suitable, recovering useful constituents and returning material to a permitted productive use can create value alongside the remediation outcome.

We have spent decades working with difficult materials. Treatment, disposal and recovery each have a role, and the material profile and intended endpoint determine the right approach.

Take one of our projects in eastern Canada. At an operating steel facility in Quebec, Nelson treated approximately 80,000 tonnes of oil-impacted mill scale.

We used Indirect Thermal Desorption to separate the oil without combusting the iron-bearing material. The project recovered 3,828,163 litres of oil and reduced residual oil in the treated material to less than 0.1 percent.

Most importantly, 100 percent of the ferrous material was returned to steel production. The recovered oil was used as recycled fuel. Two useful output streams came from one impacted material.

That is resource recovery.

Bringing treatment to the source

In other applications, recovery can mean separating oil, carbon-rich solids, steel and process gas from end-of-life tires. Drill cuttings, lime sludge, centrifuge cake, industrial plastics and carbon sludge also require material-specific evaluation.

The material determines the solution. Recovery is appropriate where the process and output requirements support it; it is not an assured result for every waste stream.

Our mobile systems allow us to bring treatment to the source. Depending on the application, we can configure systems for large continuous projects or smaller and more remote sites. On-site treatment may reduce hauling while supporting control over the material’s treatment and subsequent use.

For an industrial site in Alberta, a useful starting question is whether a mobile unit could process a suitable stream on location. The answer depends on characterization, approvals, site access, volumes and a verified destination for any recovered products.

What we leave behind

It just takes the spark of an idea to turn a problem into a strategy. Where recovery is supported by evidence, it can also strengthen the environmental story that stakeholders care about.

For a long time, our economy has been very good at extraction. We take resources from the ground, turn them into products and eventually dispose of what is left.

Environmental remediation has an opportunity to contribute to a more circular model.

I have always believed that our responsibility in this business extends beyond completing the project in front of us. The real test is what we leave behind when the equipment is gone.

Sometimes success means eliminating organic contamination through appropriate treatment. Sometimes we can go further and extract new value from old problems.

That is what resource recovery means to me. Because tomorrow matters.

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Sources and further reading

Mill scale recovery project

Resource recovery

Mobile thermal technology configurations

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