Trucking Pre-Swollen Gel 60 km: Paying to Move Water by the Tonne
One tonne of dry gel becomes 250 tonnes wet, or twelve truckloads. When pre-swelling on site beats hauling wet gel, and how to feed powder into a hydroseeder.
Two Crews, 400 Trees, One Day: The Labour Side of Gel Economics
Stopwatch figures for mixing, dipping and scooping gel, costed per tree at 28 an hour. Why the fastest method is not always the cheapest on a large contract.
Price per Tonne Is the Wrong Number: Cost per Cubic Metre of Water Held
Delivered price per tonne hides absorption, availability and season loss. A four-line calculation showing which quote is cheaper per cubic metre stored.
Paying for Water: What Six Percent Moisture Costs Across Twenty Tonnes
A purchaser in Guangzhou compared two suppliers on price and chose the one at 1,980 dollars a tonne over the one at 2,090. Eighteen months later, an audit of the receiving records showed the winning supplier averaged 7.9 percent volatile content against 2.8 percent for the other. On 240 tonnes a yea…
Selling Used Cooking Oil or Gelling It: Deciding per Litre, Not per Habit
A 160-cover bistro produces 380 litres of used cooking oil a month and is paid 0.35 dollars a litre for it, about 133 dollars. It also throws away roughly 40 litres a month of pan oil, tray oil and plate oil that never reaches the drum. That 40 litres is enough to break four bins a month, trigger tw…
Cost Per Litre Absorbed: SAP, Sawdust and Vermiculite Side by Side
The comparison usually starts with price per kilogram, which is the one number that guarantees the wrong answer. Sawdust at USD 0.20/kg looks like a fifth of the cost of polymer at USD 3.20/kg. Then you work out that you need 350 kg of sawdust to take up a 1,000-litre spill that 7 kg of polyacrylate…
Five Leachate Streams Where Solidification Makes Things Worse
Every supplier in this business has a story about the job they should have turned down. Ours was a lagoon of dilute leachate at a transfer station: 400 m3 at under 1% dry solids, and a plan to solidify the lot for road transport. The arithmetic said 90 tonnes of polymer and 480 tonnes of wet gel. Th…
What Actually Moves Your Cost per Cubic Metre of Leachate
Ask three contractors for a cost per cubic metre on the same leachate and you will get three numbers spread by a factor of two. Almost none of the difference sits in the price of the polymer. It sits in what each of them quietly assumed about dose, haul distance, rework and how much water they would…
Cost Per Bin or Cost Per Tonne: Which Number Should You Budget On?
Two managers can look at the same solidification programme and reach opposite conclusions, because one is counting currency per bin and the other is counting currency per tonne. Neither is wrong. They answer different questions, and the confusion between them is where most business cases fall apart …
