A wide range of opportunities exist for greatly increasing the efficiency of concentrators, in their design and by retro-fitting existing concentrators, but exploitation of the opportunities will depend on the perceived urgency for this change within the mineral industry by companies. The industry has left behind a recent decade of unusually high product prices which resulted in an emphasis on "production at almost any cost" and which resulted in an emphasis on rapidly designing, constructing and operating new concentrators, reducing the scope for innovation in the concentrator and increasing reliance on some standardization of the designs. For each deposit, the design and operation of a concentrator should be considered within the framework of optimisation of the total mining/processing sequence. It would be necessary to evaluate the potential for identification and rejection of low grade uneconomic portions of the mined material for each deposit. The evaluation would recognize those deposits for which the approach is applicable, resulting in an improvement of feed quality early in the mining/processing sequence. This aspect which at present often only receives cursory attention for most design studies can also be assessed for an existing mining/processing sequence for which retro-fitting is a possibility. Within a new concentrator, important options giving improvements in metallurgical and energy efficiencies will be described. Some of these options may also be implementable for an existing concentrator. Consideration of some important concentrator designs from the past will be undertaken briefly because of the instructive design approaches and because of their relevance for future designs.