There is nothing new about the desire to take something mundane and find a way to make it valuable. Medieval alchemists, for example, dedicated their lives to finding a way to turn lead into gold. That particular process never worked out, but Danville-based Alliance Magnesium is working hard to prove that one person’s trash can indeed become another’s treasure. “The objective of the business is to produce metallic magnesium using the tailings piles found in Asbestos,” said Pierre Saint-Aubin, Alliance Magnesium’s co-founder and Vice-President of Corporate Affairs explaining that the company, founded in 2012, has purchased the equipment and properties of Noranda’s failed Magnola plant in Danville and the defunct Norsk Hydro facility in Bécancour in order to start fresh with a modified approach. “We blended the two technologies together with some of our current research, to create our own technology,” the Vice President said. See full story in the Friday, March 1 edition of The Record.