CIMIC Group subsidiaries Sedgman and Leighton Asia have secured separate contracts from Hindustan Zinc Limited to help deliver India’s first zinc tailings recycling facility at the Rampura Agucha Mine in Rajasthan. Sedgman will focus on process plant and tailings treatment infrastructure, while Leighton Asia will provide project delivery and construction services for the brownfield site. The project signals large-scale reprocessing of legacy zinc tailings at one of the world’s largest zinc operations, with implications for paste backfill design, tailings storage stability and metal recovery circuits.

Exploration activity across Australia this week includes Argent Minerals reporting high-grade silver intercepts at its Kempfield project in New South Wales, with mineralisation extending along strike from existing volcanogenic massive sulphide-style resources. Kalamazoo Resources advanced drilling at its gold targets in the Pilbara and Central Victorian Goldfields, focusing on structurally controlled lodes near historic workings and testing down-dip extensions below old stopes. Adelong Gold continued resource-definition work at the Adelong project in NSW, targeting shear-hosted quartz veins to upgrade JORC classifications and refine pit and underground designs.

American Rare Earths’ Halleck Creek project in Wyoming has secured a Seed Translational Acceleration of Research (STAR) award via the University of Wyoming’s NSF Accelerating Research Translation programme to study byproducts and tailings from rare earth extraction. The work, led by Tyler Brown at UW’s School of Energy Resources, will assess technical viability, processing requirements and end-use applications for these materials and their impact on project economics. Halleck Creek metallurgical tests have already upgraded ore from 0.34% to 3.72% TREO, removing 93.5% of non-rare earth material early so only 6.5% requires further refining.