Boom to bust cycles seem to be intrinsic to histories of both industrial mining and capitalism itself. As Anna Tsing has noted, the story of capitalism can be told as one of repetitive histories of “promise and ruin” (Tsing 2015:18). The boom to bust histories of modern mining in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province began in 1852 with copper, then diamonds in the 1870s, followed by asbestos and, in more recent years, the mining of iron resources and rare earths. The Northern Cape landscape is littered with the blasted landscapes (Tsing 2015) and the detritus of mining, including the nuclear waste site of Vaalputs. Yet, mining is still a major contributor to the GDP of the Northern Cape Province, and the region has recently had numerous new applications for shale-gas exploration, as well as the ongoing extraction from heavy mineral sand mining, uranium and base metals such as zinc, lead, and copper (Walker and Hoffman, 2023). And now the Northern Cape’s Namaqualand copper is seen by mining entrepreneurs to be once again on the upswing, this time as a vital ingredient for the 21st century green technological revolution. In fact, ‘sustainability’ is at the centre of this upbeat ‘green’ copper talk as well as ambitious plans for renewable energy and a R100b Green Hydrogen programme. Namaqualand copper mines that were closed for decades have recently been reopened with promises of a massive demand for copper to meet future ‘green energy’ needs. In Concordia, for example, a mine has started carting off tonnes of tailings from the town’s mine dumps to a processing plant in nearby Nababeep. Drawing on Gabrielle Hecht’s (2023) recent work on ‘residual governance,’ this paper will focus on problems of waste created by ‘green’ extractivism and how social movement activists envisage repair in these blasted landscapes.