Keynote speaker

Ashleigh Morris

CEO and Co-Founder, Coreo

As the CEO of Coreo, Ashleigh is catalysing the transition to a circular economy. In five short years Coreo’s dynamic team has delivered hundreds of highly impactful projects across a broad range of industries and supply chains, including the largest producers and consumers of metals.

Ashleigh drives strategy and execution of initiatives to create value across the life-cycles of iron ore, metallurgical coal, copper, aluminium and other critical minerals, for global clients like Fortescue, Anglo American, BHP, Rio Tinto, South32, Alcoa, the Aluminium Council of Australia and the Australian Government.

Globally recognised for her circular economy leadership, Ashleigh is a member of the AusIMM ESG Advisory Council, and a responsible mining expert with working groups for the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) and The Copper Mark Chain of Custody. She holds advisory roles across mining, textiles and renewable fuels industries, and serves on the board of the Australian Circular Economy Hub.

Presentation title: From Critical Minerals to Critical Value

Presentation synopsis

For generations, we've mined the seam. The next era of Australian competitiveness will come from mining the system.

As demand for critical minerals accelerates, the challenge is no longer finding more resources. It is finding smarter ways to create more value from the resources we already have. Across our resource regions sit untapped revenue streams, overlooked minerals, shared infrastructure and opportunities that remain invisible when every project is viewed in isolation. The question is no longer where to look, but how to look.

Mining has always evolved by recovering more from what already exists, from beneficiation to tailings reprocessing. The next leap forward is systems intelligence: aggregating trace minerals, sharing infrastructure, coordinating recovery across regions, and unlocking value that no single operation could realise alone.

Drawing on more than a decade of systems leadership across Australia's resources sector, Ashleigh Morris challenges conventional thinking about value creation. Through pioneering work mapping the circularity of tungsten carbide in Queensland's Bowen Basin, she demonstrates how value extends far beyond extraction, connecting mining, manufacturing, product use, and material recovery into one integrated system.

Ashleigh will also introduce the Full Value, Full Volume methodology, revealing how the critical mineral that first attracts investment often becomes just one part of a much larger regional opportunity. Through examples including early collaboration across Queensland's emerging vanadium industry and the growing potential of urban mining, she shows how competitive advantage is created when industries operate as connected systems rather than isolated projects.

This keynote offers a practical framework for rethinking critical minerals, not simply as commodities to extract, but as catalysts for more resilient, productive and prosperous industrial ecosystems.