81 potential for reclaiming water and improving the environmental impact. This helps enable a closed loop and circular solution for water within mine operations. Trend Spotlight: With the recent emphasis on critical minerals, several governments, including the US, are enacting policy and regulatory changes to support investment in critical mineral recovery from waste and tailings (Gardner, 2025). Geological surveys have identified zinc, germanium, tellurium, and rare earth elements in mine waste. Innovation in hydrometallurgy and leaching processes can enable more efficient recovery of residual metals from tailings that were historically uneconomic to process. A great example of this technology is from Phoenix Tailings, which extracts and refines critical minerals such as rare earth elements from mining waste and tailings-type feedstocks via advanced chemical/electrochemical routes. Their process uses selective ligands to extract and isolate pure metal oxides from waste, followed by molten salt electrolysis to turn the oxides into solid, industrial-grade metal (Phoenix Tailings, 2025). 2.2 Eliminate Waste Early rejection of waste can unlock significant benefits, from requiring fewer inputs to processing due to selectivity, and lower generation of waste. The following opportunities can be utilized to eliminate waste: • Precision mining through technological advancements such as directional drilling and keyhole mining can reduce the waste that is brought to the surface to be processed. Many of these technologies were developed and improved in the oil and gas sector. Additionally, they show promise if they can be adapted for use in mining. • Bulk ore sorting and ore upgrading, such as through CRC ORE’s Grade Engineering approach (Leonida, 2024), enables early waste rejection and improving ore processing efficiency. Ore sorting systems have improved their sophistication, and that can lead to better grade control outcomes. For certain commodities, dry processing can avoid and minimize the use of water, significantly lowering tailings production. Dry processing can include a range of technologies such as dry crushing and grinding, dry separation through air classification, and electrostatic, magnetic, or gravity-based separation, and dry flotation. However, dry processing is challenging due to differences in commodity and mineral types, and the technology is in early stages of development. Some iron ore and REE processing sites have been able to develop dry processing and beneficiation. Trend Spotlight: Advanced sensing solutions are moving beyond single view sorting by integrating data from multiple sources such as X-ray and advanced imaging techniques into a single AI driven engine. An example of this is the mine to mill digital solution from MineSense that utilizes XRF and electromagnetic spectroscopy to identify ore chemistry through sensors mounted on excavators, loaders, and conveyor belts. Their AI solution recognizes spectral
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