What goes around comes around, profitably!

The 58 mines in the Bowen Basin are in the same place, digging up the same stuff, using the same tools, generating the same materials and facing the same challenges… Yet despite these commonalities, each mine manages its by-products in isolation. This fragmented approach leads to duplication, underinvestment in recovery infrastructure, and missed opportunities to realise the economic and environmental gains that come from working together.

This report presents an alternative vision for regional collaboration: a Multi Mine Circular Resource Recovery Facility designed to serve as a shared circular recovery hub for mines across Queensland’s Bowen Basin. By aggregating priority material streams and applying high value circular solutions, the facility can unlock significant environmental, social, and economic value, while transforming how the region thinks about mining inputs and waste.

Mining powers economies, but the materials that power mining – think timber pallets, bulk bags, tyres, scrap metal, cardboard and more – are treated as expendable. Once used, they are discarded, stockpiled, or buried, creating unnecessary environmental harm, lost economic value, and mounting logistical burdens. 

Grounded in rigorous analysis by Coreo and the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, this report identifies high-volume waste streams, assesses their current impact, and proposes tailored recovery solutions for each. From vermicomposting food waste to remanufacturing timber pallets, from devulcanising tyres into new industrial materials to recovering steel and polymer from complex goods, the report maps pathways to scale circularity across the sector.

This is more than a waste management strategy. It’s a systems-level prospectus for smarter mining, one where waste is a resource, value is circular, and collaboration is core.