Rare Earth elements have become increasingly important for advanced technologies such as information systems and renewable energy. In the exploitation of alluvial gold deposits, such as the operation carried out by Mineros S.A. in the valley of the Nechí River, in Colombia, heavy mineral sands are discarded and discharged into the environment. Although the black sand has been the source of gold for over 20 years, the rare-earth resource of the black sand is becoming even more attractive, with increasing dependency of human civilisation on energy. The rare-earth concentrates, potentially in the form of monazite and zircon, need a thorough chemical and mineralogical charaterization if such mined alluvial resources are likely to be processed for rare-earth oxide product manufacturing for emerging battery, magnets, fluorescent lamp, PV, lasers and/or catalysis markets. Colombia is one of the fastest growing economies in S America. It has mineral resources which are essential for the energy sector, i.e. storage, generation and transduction devices. The country is in need of urgent collaboration for building technical and scientific capabilities, as knowledge and expertise in rare-earth minerals processing currently does not exist in Colombia and is also limited in the neighboring countries. In the proposed Newton scheme, our goal is to set up collaboration with the internationally leading group at the University of Leeds, Leeds in UK, for: i) rare-earth mineralogical characterisation for sustainable processing and ii) value addition for manufacturing products locally for supporting infrastructure, which ultimately will reduce global carbon footprint. It is aimed that the proposed collaboration via knowledge exchange between the National University of Colombia, the industry partner Mineros S.A. and the University of Leeds UK, will also help in building the Knowledge Capacity in academia and in industry, starting with black sand processing for rare-earths, and then grow this collaboration in other areas of mineralogical characterisation, processing and manufacturing.