A team of researchers at Mount Allison University was searching for a waste remediation product for miners last year when they struck gold.

Literally.

As a result, they have formed Kasis Environmental, a Sackville- and Moncton-based company that has devised a safe, environmentally friendly means of extracting gold from the rock miners bring out of the ground. If successful, the team could end the use of cyanide in the mining process, making mines safer for both humans and the environment.

CEO Travis Osmond said mines around the world are searching for ways to end the use of cyanide, and Kasis can offer a cost-efficient means of doing so.

“It’s not a matter of planning on if all the mines will change but when,” he said in a presentation to the Fundica Roadshow in Halifax this month.

Last year, Osmond and some fellow Mount A academics were researching whether they could use organic materials to remove toxic materials from tailing ponds. They weren’t having a lot of success, so on a whim they tested to see if their material could remove minerals from a pool of muck. It worked, and suddenly they realized that had a very marketable product.

They call it CyoCell, and it’s a biofiber that gold clings to. Osmond won’t discuss the composition, other than to say it’s made of organic material. He believes it could address a market that’s worth about $4 billion worldwide.

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Gold miners now extract gold by crushing rocks and dissolving the powder in a slurry in an oil drum, mixing in cyanide and other materials, which separate out the gold in 24 hours. But there are safety risks when workers have to handle the cyanide, and you have to dispose of the concoction later at a huge cost.

What Kasis does is do away with the poisonous chemicals, instead lowering CyoCell into the slurry like a teabag. A day later, it removes the CyoCell from the solution and bits of gold are clinging to it. Osmond said a kilogram of CyoCell can extract 25 grams of gold.

The team, which has raised about $100,000 in equity funding, owns the intellectual property for CyoCell and is planning to roll the product out in the next few years. It is talking to two Canadian mines, and preparing to go through a pilot with one company, which operates a gold mine in Newfoundland.  Osmond said it will take about six months to prepare a site for the pilot and then run the pilot tests for about six months.

But the upside is huge because environmental laws are becoming more stringent and the costs of cleaning up mining sites are extreme.

“They like our product,” said Osmond, “because it’s not cyanide and you don’t have the environmental costs to come up with.”