I enjoyed listening to Professor Daniel Franks – Director of the Global Centre for Mineral Security at the University of Queensland – speaking on Australian radio this week.

He was discussing a key global challenge – sand depletion – and the win/win strategies that are being developed to address it.

(TL;DR – The world is fast using up supplies of the sand and gravel suitable for building. There is considerable potential to (profitably) address this issue by supplying sand and avoiding the costs of mining tailings.)

The audio interview – from ABC Radio National – is here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/sand-shortage-daniel-franks/105918556

There’s a background article available from the University of Queensland website here: https://smi.uq.edu.au/article/2025/03/nose-tail-mining-how-making-sand-ore-could-solve-looming-crisis

Converting rock into metal is a complex, multi-step process which differs by type of metal and by type of ore. After crushing, the minerals in the ore are typically separated using flotation, where the metal-containing sulphide minerals attach to tiny bubbles that float up through the slurry of rock and water.

At this stage, leftover ore is normally separated out to be disposed of as waste. But if we continue to process the ore, such as by spinning it in a cyclone, impurities can be removed and the right particle size and shape can be achieved to meet the specifications for sand.

Source: “Nose-to-tail mining: how making sand from ore could solve a looming crisis”

Key takeaways for me were:

1. Proving this process has gone well beyond the laboratory, and is happening in several sites today.
2. It’s turning out that a lot of potential ore-sand is located relatively (affordably) close to where construction is happening.
3. There are only small extra costs/investments involved – because the ore-sand is an existing byproduct of existing ore extraction processing – so adding straightforward steps to the existing extraction process creates value.
   However:
4. Humans being human, many miners haven’t recognised the opportunity potential because they automatically equate “tailings” with “waste” and “overhead cost”.
5. Languaging the opportunity differently – talking about “ore sand” and “nose-to-tail mining” has been powerful in creating a new understanding.

As regenerative business entrepreneurs regularly point out:

“There is no waste – only byproducts with unrealised value.” -Various sources