We Ran the Cost-Per-Ton Numbers on Our Own Shipments

Back in May we argued that price per pin is close to meaningless and that cost per ton shredded is the number that matters. We offered to run those numbers with anyone who wanted to.

Then we ran them on ourselves.

The number we did not expect to find

The hard part of any cost-per-ton calculation is pin life. Almost nobody tracks it properly, and asking a maintenance manager “how many tons do you get out of a set?” usually produces a shrug and an estimate.

But replacement intervals show up in order history whether anyone is tracking them or not. Going back through ours, a pattern turned up that we had never looked for: multiple operators reordering the same size, twelve pins at a time, on a roughly monthly cycle. Two independent yards, 31 and 35 days apart.

That is not a survey and we are not going to pretend it is one. It is two data points. But it is two measured data points, and it is a far better starting assumption than a shrug.

The arithmetic

Cost per ton = (pins per changeout x price per pin) / tons shredded before the next changeout

Take twelve pins at $1,000 each — a round number for illustration, not a quote — on a 31-day cycle, running eight hours a day, five days a week. What comes out depends almost entirely on how big the machine is:

Throughput bands are from Recycling Today’s shredder guide.

Somewhere between about thirty cents and two and a half dollars a ton. On a plant shredding a few hundred thousand tons a year, pins are a real line item — but they are not the line item most people think they are.

The comparison that actually matters

Now put a failure next to it.

At that 4,000 HP plant, an eighteen-hour unplanned changeout costs roughly 2,340 tons of production you never made. At $40 a ton of gross margin, that is about $93,600 gone.

The pins for that changeout cost about $12,000.

One surprise failure costs nearly eight times the parts. Eighteen hours is the figure we used in May, and it is not a worst case — it is a stop-to-running-again number that includes getting people and a crane to the rotor, not just the time spent turning wrenches.

That ratio is the whole argument. Not “buy better pins.” Buy pins on a schedule you control, because the parts were never the expensive part.

Run it with your own numbers

Ours are illustrative. Yours are not. Three questions get you a real figure:

• What is your actual throughput, in tons per hour, and how many hours a week do you genuinely run?
• How many pins go in at a changeout, and how many days between them?
• What is a lost hour of production actually worth to you, downstream included?

If your answer to the second one is “I would have to go and look,” your order history already knows. Ours did.

What this means for your pins

The cost of a hammer pin per ton shredded is small and predictable. The cost of finding out you needed one is neither.

If you want us to run this on your operation, send us your throughput and your changeout interval and we will do the arithmetic with you — including the part where we tell you your current pins are fine. No obligation, and no interest in selling you a pin you do not need.

Keep America Shredding.