Laboratory planetary mills have been widely used by researchers studying effects of mechanochemical activation. These mills are usually of the batch type (they need periodic loading-unloading). Scaling up of the planetary mills was considered to be intrinsically impossible. In the recent years successful technical solutions for the problem of continuous feeding of a material into the jars (drums) moving at very high speeds was found, and viable machines operating in the continuous mode have been made. Industrial planetary mills of productivity ranging from 20-70 kg/h to 3-5 t/h (for the powders of -10 mum fraction) have been manufactured and used in mining industry (for gold and diamond recovery from ores). The paper discusses the possibilities of the novel grinding equipment. Investigation of milling of cemented tungsten carbide (WC/Co) and of the WC/Co tools inserts coated with TiN showed that grinding of these hard materials to micron and submicron scale of particles can be performed in several minutes. High efficiency of grinding was demonstrated for a number of materials (graphite, Mo concentrate, MgO). (C) 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.