After the raw ore is excavated, there are some impurities, which must be removed by mineral processing before it can be used in smelting production. This is mineral processing. However, many beneficiation methods use flotation, which needs to break the raw ore into particles as small as sand, so there is a grinding workshop: a workshop dedicated to grinding the raw ore to a qualified size. The main equipments are jaw crusher, ball mill and raymond mill.

Flotation workshop is a workshop where qualified ores treated by grinding workshop are sent to flotation machine for flotation. The main equipment is flotation machine.

After the flotation is completed, the qualified ore will be sent to the next smelting step for treatment. However, some impurities will still be selected, which is called tailings. Tailings are not useless, but a kind of lean ore that cannot be refined by current or existing units or whose refining cost is too high. Then littering everywhere not only pollutes the environment, but also wastes resources. So there should be a workshop to deal with tailings.