First Tin Plc announced that additional mineral processing testwork for its Definitive Feasibility Study ("DFS") at its Taronga Tin Project ("Taronga") in Australia, has shown enhanced recoveries from the gravity circuit of the project. ALS Laboratory in Burnie, Tasmania, one of the foremost laboratories for tin processing testwork worldwide, recently completed testwork on crushing preconcentrates of two samples from the Taronga project: A "low grade" bulk sample, blasted from the old Newmont adit in the North zone, with a head grade of 0.11% Sn. A composite "variability" sample of half core from throughout the deposit (both North and South zones), constructed to be close to the average composition and average head grade of the deposit, around 0.13% Sn.

Results highlights: Gravity circuit testwork on both the low grade bulk sample and the variability core sample crushing pre-concentrates has returned: Low grade (0.11% Sn): 71.5% tin recovery to a 69.8% Sn concentrate; Variability (0.13% Sn): 72.5% tin recovery to an 60.1% Sn concentrate. These results are significant improvements on the previous recoveries for the high grade bulk sample (0.18% Sn), due to optimising the flowsheet based on the earlier work. The results confirm that mineralisation with head grades at or below the average head grade of 0.13% Sn, return plus 70% recovery to the coarse tin gravity circuit.

Inclusion of a fine tin circuit will be examined later and this should increase the overall recovery even further; Total recovery, including losses from the crushing pre-concentration, will be reported in the next few weeks. Based on learning from the previous testwork on the "high grade" sample, the recent ALS testwork more closely followed the revised processing flowsheet, include size classification before the spiral circuit. Results were excellent, with recoveries through the gravity circuit of 71.5% tin to a 69.8%Sn concentrate for the low grade sample and 72.5% tin to a 60.1% concentrate for the variability sample.

These are both significant improvements on the previous high grade sample results, which returned a gravity circuit recovery of 66.4% tin to a 56.2% Sn concentrate. The new recoveries are close to those obtained by previous work conducted by Newmont and Aus Tin. Additional work is being conducted on dressing of the variability sample concentrate, with the aim of increasing concentrate grade.

Both samples had previously been upgraded by crushing and screening at 2.8mm and thus overall recovery will be proportionately lower. End to end results including the crushing will be reported in the next many weeks. It should be noted that the low grade sample has a lower head grade (0.11% Sn) than the average mined grade (0.13% Sn) and the variability sample has a head grade of 0.13%.

The variability sample has a head grade the variability sample has a headgrade of 0.13% Sn. Hence assumptions drawn from this work may be conservative.