A new rare earth mineral facility is set to open in South Africa, backed by US investment and built around what the company says is a ground-breaking extraction technique. The project draws from waste on the site of a former chemical plant in northern Limpopo Province, where the minerals can be easily accessed.
Rainbow Rare Earths project director Alberto Bruttomesso explained the company’s work in Phalaborwa, South Africa, on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, as the operation moved toward opening. The facility is part of a wider race for rare earth supplies, with US President Donald Trump having to put aside his hostility toward South Africa to secure the minerals.
The scale of the effort matters because rare earths are not a single metal but a group of more than 40 elements used in high-value industrial production. On Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, metallurgist Roux Wildenboer explained the advanced Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer Rainbow Rare Earths uses in Johannesburg, South Africa, to collect, dilute and analyze test work and pilot plant samples. That same day, junior process engineer Mamasia Moshokwa inspected an ongoing leaching test at the site.
The technical detail matters because Rainbow Rare Earths is trying to show that material once treated as waste can be turned into a commercial supply stream. The company’s pitch rests on a cleaner, more precise extraction process and on the fact that the ore is already sitting in northern Limpopo Province rather than needing to be mined from scratch.
That leaves the project caught between engineering promise and geopolitics. The South Africa operation is moving ahead with American money at a moment when Washington is trying to reduce its dependence on China for critical minerals, and the diplomatic friction around South Africa has not kept the deal from advancing.
For Bruttomesso and the team around him, the next step is not a speech but a test: whether the plant can turn a waste site into a reliable source of rare earths at commercial scale.
