Trial Operation Commences for the Second Spiral Concentrator Platform at Everlast's Bangladesh Project

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 17, Australia's Everlast Minerals announced that the second floating spiral concentrator platform at its wholly-owned Gaibandha heavy mineral sands project in Bangladesh has been installed and put into trial operation. The new platform will be used to expand mineral sands processing capacity. The technical team is currently adjusting operating parameters, product quality and output, and producing mineral sands products required for subsequent trial commercial exports.

The Gaibandha project adopts wet gravity separation followed by dry separation processes. Everlast had previously planned to configure an onshore wet concentrator plant and multiple sets of floating wet separation equipment for the project. The wet separation system mainly consists of spiral concentrators, pumps, drive equipment and slurry collection systems, used to concentrate heavy minerals from raw sand; the subsequent dry separation system further separates products such as magnetite, ilmenite, garnet, zircon and rutile.

As of July 2026, the project was still in the stage of installing and commissioning additional spiral equipment, with Chinese engineers and technicians participating in on-site installation at that time. With the completion of installation of the second floating platform, Gaibandha has added an independently operable wet spiral processing unit. The company plans to continue platform performance optimization, operator training and trial production in the coming months.

The Gaibandha project currently holds three mining leases with a total area of 2,395 hectares. Everlast's published JORC mineral resources total 375 million tonnes, including 91.2 million tonnes of indicated resources with an average valuable heavy mineral content of 1.18%; and 283.9 million tonnes of inferred resources with an average valuable heavy mineral content of 1.24%. The mineral assemblage includes ilmenite, rutile, leucoxene, zircon, garnet and magnetite.

Everlast completed its first export of 109 tonnes of mineral sands concentrate from the Gaibandha project in June 2026, with the shipment bound for China; in September, it completed another export of approximately 18 tonnes of zircon concentrate. Mineral sands products produced during the trial operation of the second floating spiral platform will continue to be used for subsequent trial commercial exports.