When a mining operation comes to term, it leaves behind an anthropized landscape marked by abandoned infrastructure and a wide range of contaminated waste. Mining activities bring to the surface the toxic substances that have accumulated in the environment for thousands of years which violently compromise ecosystems. Not only do rivers, layers of the Earth and groundwater tables become environments that receive the toxic substances, they also become transport platforms. This passive migration of contaminants also disrupts the local fauna and microfauna which are consequently integrating industrial waste into their food chain, further widening the expanse of contamination in the territory.

Since the mid-1990s, the Mining Act has required "revegetation" of post-mining sites in Quebec in order to restore the "natural appearance" of brownfields. This, while confining contaminants on the site. The important ecological damage caused by such human exploitation cannot be fixed with this superficial and reductive solution. In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, anthropologist Anna L. Tsing presents a telling example of the resilience of living organisms after ecological disruption. The interaction of non-human entities on the ruins of the Anthropocene generates a so-called "feral" ecology capable of evolving beyond all human control.

Nevertheless, abandoned mining sites remain exposed to latent pollution, an ecological trauma with diffuse temporality. Despite the immense adaptability of living organisms, the possibilities for resilience vis-à-vis a deeply polluted territory are limited; natural biological processes are no longer able to withstand the weight of these disturbances. An external action must therefore support and stimulate the regeneration of living organisms towards a sustainable ecological succession. The development of 4.0 technologies and biotechnologies must together serve as a vector of innovation in the natural process of decontamination of mining wasteland. In order for the process to work independently and with a reduced human presence (which has proven to be harmful), these new cyborg tools will imperatively need to ally with the organisms inhabiting the contaminated sites to allow the possibility of rewilding.

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