Mineral processing, otherwise known as mineral dressing, is the practice of beneficiating valuable minerals from their ores. Industrial mineral treatment processes usually combine a number of unit operations in order to liberate and separate minerals by exploiting the differences in physical properties of the different minerals that make up an ore.

Many plants also incorporate hydro-metallurgical or pyro-metallurgical processes as part of an extractive metallurgical operation. Geo-metallurgy is a branch of extractive metallurgy that combines mineral processing with the geologic sciences.

Mineral processing involves four general types of operations: comminution or particle size reduction, sizing or separation of particle sizes by screening or classification, concentration by taking advantage of physical and surface chemical properties, and dewatering or solid/liquid separation.

A number of auxiliary materials handling operations are also considered a branch of mineral processing such as storage (as in bin design), conveying, sampling, weighing, slurry transport, and pneumatic transport.