Recently there has been significant interest and exploration for industrial garnet on the West Coast of the South Island. Garnet is primarily used as an abrasive for sandblasting and waterjet cutting, with global demand having increased dramatically in the last few decades due to the phasing out and banning of silica sand and slag abrasives. The West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand hosts numerous garnet-ilmenite-gold-bearing shoreline placer deposits from Bruce Bay to Karamea. Early prospecting and subsequent exploration for industrial quality garnet by Hardie Pacific on the West Coast has been very encouraging, with two projects moving to advanced stages. This study focused on characterising the physical and compositional variation of garnet along the length of the West Coast from Haast to Westport and how these relate to garnets suitability as an abrasive.We approached this topic by quantifying detrital garnet compositions and morphologies from beach strandline sands along the length of Westland coast and relating the distinctive compositions to a compiled database of known source regions. We report a method for rapid composition and morphology characterisation of sediment mineralogy based on utilization of scanning electron microscope element mapping and image analysis, and we use this technique to investigate garnet from 13 beach sand samples from along 427 km of Westland coast of New Zealand (Fig 1). CITATION: Ritchie, T and Scott, J, 2019. Placer garnet of the west coast of the South Island, New Zealand, in Proceedings PACRIM 2019, pp 274276 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).