If your role involves the design and/or optimisation of elements in an iron ore value chain, defining how it is operated or procurement of consumables to keep it going, then you are (consciously or unconsciously) making decisions about the trade-off between wear rate and cost. These decisions have numerous and far reaching financial consequences for the operations involved, so they nned to be informed by the available science.In this paper the phenomenon of wear is explored from an iron ore flow perspective. Starting with the common wear impacts of bad (ill informed) decisions, the paper identifies the benefits of the science informed decision before articulating the specific mechanism responsible for wear in iron ore operations. Accelerated testing has an important role to play although test selection is critical in order to maximise the benefit. Both the applicability and utility of the various qualitative and quantitative accelerated wear testing options are considered with practical guidance in relation to the approach required for iron ore operations.Once a proxy for the wear rate for a given iron ore-liner combination has been determined, the knowledge can be used directly to improve value chain design choices as well as predict the impact of optimisation changes from a wear perspective.Wear rate, throughput and ore quality are inextricably linked. Any informed decision relating to throughput and/or the flow characteristics of the ore therefore needs to incorporate its wear implications in order to avoid a false economy. In addition, this informed approach ensures that increases in the instantaneous rate and/or product quality are not achieved at the expense of operational availability. CITATION:Wellwood, G A, 2019. Opportunity is wear science and awareness meet!, in Proceedings Iron Ore 2019, pp 828841 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).