The current demand for commodities is very high, at least in part as a result of the industrial revolution occurring in China and to a lesser extent in India and other developing countries. This demand has led to a search of the globe for occurrences of economic concentrations of a wide variety of minerals and elements including but not limited to iron oxides. Occurrences of iron oxides, whether present in their natural state or in tailings of prior mining or mineral processing operations, can be economically recoverable if low cost mineral processing systems, such as those based upon magnetic properties of minerals, are developed that can isolate the iron oxides into commercially valuable concentrations. The efficient recovery of weakly magnetic or para-magnetic particles from assemblages of magnetic and non-magnetic particles would make many mineral and elemental occurrences around the planet economically viable as sources of iron. Of particular economic interest are concentrations of iron that occur naturally in certain rock and mineral formations around the planet and iron concentrations that result from the creation of reject tailings deposition basins or lean ore stockpiles resulting from past mining and mineral processing operations. These tailings basins and stockpiles represent a collection of elements in a form that already has considerable energy, manpower and “carbon footprint” invested into the mining and size reduction of the rock involved and therefore such occurrences have even greater economic and environmental attraction in the ongoing commodity shortage and concerns regarding climate change. However, to date mineral processing systems effective to isolate iron oxides from such occurrences have been unavailable, unknown, or prohibitively expensive to build and operate. There is an ongoing need, therefore, for advancements relating to the recovery of iron oxide from such occurrences. The present application addresses this need.