363 Most papers report process-level indicators such as recovery yield, selectivity, process time and productivity, reagent and energy intensity, operational stability, and secondary residue handling. However, reporting of plant-level operational indicators and economic outcomes (e.g., operating cost per ton, margin per ton) is inconsistent and often not comparable because many studies do not specify system boundaries, baselines, or observation windows. When papers address adoption and plant-scale deployment, they typically describe constraints and requirements such as integration into existing processing flowsheets, regulatory compliance, infrastructure needs, and collaboration with technology providers, rather than measuring organizational conditions inside firms. 5. Discussion 5.1 Interpretation of results: what the evidence suggests The consolidated pathway clusters show that mining circularity research is rich in technical options and increasingly diverse in mechanisms and target outputs. At the same time, evidence remains uneven on how these options become stable operating practices with repeatable performance. This matters for “trust” because stakeholders—including operators, regulators, and communities—need performance claims that are traceable, comparable, and robust under realistic variability. 5.2 Barriers and enablers Across the corpus, barriers and enablers concentrate in four domains: − Feed variability and material complexity, which affect selectivity, reagent demand, product quality, and stability. − Integration and infrastructure, including compatibility with existing circuits, utilities, water balance, and residue handling. − Regulation and market conditions, including discharge standards, permitting, and specification requirements for recovered products. − Collaboration and governance, including partnerships with technology providers or universities and decision frameworks for scale-up. − These conditions are repeatedly cited as practical constraints, but they are rarely translated into standardized indicators or comparable reporting templates. 5.3 Organizational learning, culture, and transferability The organizational lens highlights that culture and learning are rarely operationalized in mining circularity papers, despite repeated indirect references to adoption barriers, governance needs, and scale-up constraints. This suggests a research opportunity to integrate established culture–learning–performance constructs into mining circularity studies, enabling explanations of why similar technologies succeed in some settings and stall in others. Transferability of
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