SigraFi has secured a $35 million credit facility from a consortium led by UAE-based Ronin Commercial Brokers to finance gold offtake from organised artisanal and small-scale gold mining cooperatives in the DRC, Zambia and South America. The company already works with PeaceGold in eastern DRC, covering 11 cooperatives and about 25,000 miners in Ituri Province, using multi-year contracts and guaranteed offtake at competitive prices. The model targets ASGM’s roughly 20% share of global newly mined gold by providing traceable, compliant supply to institutional refiners previously reliant on informal channels.

WIM Resource has secured a mining licence for the Avonbank mineral sands project in western Victoria, located about 15km north-east of Horsham, to extract a heavy mineral assemblage including zircon, titanium minerals and rare earth elements. The approval follows a formal assessment by Resources Victoria, clearing the way for large-scale dredge or dry mining of strandline-style deposits typical of the Murray Basin. For geotechnical and processing teams, the mix of zircon and rare earth-bearing minerals signals complex separation flowsheets and tailings management in fine-grained sands.

Excavator bucket maintenance is shifting from ad hoc onsite crack and wear repairs to planned, lifecycle-based strategies led by Austin Engineering. General manager sales APAC/EMEA Brad Higgins and key account manager Troy [surname not given] use real-world case studies to compare reactive weld-and-patch approaches with scheduled structural rebuilds and liner replacements. The move towards planned cycles aims to stabilise downtime windows, standardise repair scopes and improve fatigue performance of large mining buckets, with direct implications for shutdown planning and wear-material selection.