Author name: Anita Parbhakar-­Fox

The raw materials industry produces billions of tonnes of mine waste per year. Given increasing metal demand and the global appetite for waste reduction, strategic opportunities to minimise its production must be embedded across the life-of-mine. Adopting a geometallurgical approach to total deposit characterisation—where mineralogical and geochemical data are routinely collected and used to model geoenvironmental domains—offers profound benefits for improving the understanding of the composition and environmental impact of different residues. Using established and emerging technologies, from handheld instruments and core scanners to synchrotrons, throughout a mine’s life—starting already during exploration—may assist the raw materials industry to reduce their waste footprint and adopt circular economy principles.

Geometallurgy is an interdisciplinary research field concerned with the planning, monitoring, and optimisation of mineral resource extraction and beneficiation. Geometallurgy relies on a quantitative under- standing of primary resource characteristics such as mineralogical composition and texture, the spatial distribution and variability of these characteristics, and how they interact with mining and beneficiation processes. Thus, geometallurgy requires accurate analytical data for resource characterisation and detailed models of orebody geology, mining and processing technologies, mineral economics, and the often-complex interactions between them. Here, we introduce the fundamental concepts relevant to the field, with particular emphasis on the current state-of-the-art and some notes on potential future developments.