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The mining industry is not always synonymous with innovation. Extraction methods have been entrenched for decades, and many companies are happy to stick with the same mining and milling processes that are standard across the sector.
“There’s a monolithic barrier to anybody trying to do anything new, because everybody’s the same and everybody thinks the same,” says Andrew Bamber, chief executive of MineSense Technologies Ltd.
Mr. Bamber, 43, believes there is an untapped billion-dollar market for innovation and new technologies within the broader industry. With Vancouver-based MineSense’s latest invention, a unique ore-handling technology for optimizing metal recovery, Mr. Bambler hopes to help prove his case.
The technology has nothing to do with finding new mines. It is about identifying valuable ore in existing mines that he believes companies are foolishly throwing away. Conversely, it is about making sure companies do not waste time and money processing low-quality ore.
When mining firms design their mine plans, they spend hours poring over the drill holes on a property and carefully assigning value to blocks of material in the ground. Rock that gets assigned a high value goes to the mill for processing, and low-value material gets shipped to the waste pile.