Cost & Quoting

Cost Per Ton in Aggregates and Bulk Handling: How to Build a Defensible Quote

A breakdown of the real cost drivers behind a ton of crushed or conveyed material, and how to quote so the fines, wear metal, and downtime do not eat your margin.

Cost per saleable ton, not cost per ton processed, is the number that decides whether a job makes money. If you crush and screen 500 t/h but only 134 t/h leaves as saleable product because of gradation splits and fines, your fixed costs spread across a third of the throughput. Run your Aggregate Yield first, then divide total operating cost by saleable tonnage. A plant that ignores this quotes off nameplate 500 t/h and loses money on every load because the denominator was 3.7 times too large.

Energy is the largest variable cost in crushing, often 40 to 60 percent of processing cost. Comminution follows Bond's relationship, so energy per ton rises sharply as product size falls: reducing from 40 mm to 10 mm can double kWh per ton. At a US 9 cents per kWh and a specific energy of 1.5 kWh/t for coarse crushing, that is 13.5 cents per ton; push to fine product at 4 kWh/t and it climbs to 36 cents. Quote the fine fractions at a higher unit cost, because the physics guarantees they cost more to make.

Wear parts are the sneaky line item. Jaw plates, cone mantles, screen media, and conveyor skirting are consumed per ton, not per hour. Manganese jaw dies on abrasive granite might last 80,000 to 120,000 tons; a 4,500 dollar set spread over 100,000 tons is 4.5 cents per ton. Screen panels on a hard rock deck run 1 to 3 cents per ton. Build these into a wear allowance of 0.10 to 0.30 dollars per ton depending on abrasion index, and track actual life so the next quote uses real consumption, not the salesman's brochure number.

Labor and machine time attach through availability. A plant staffed for 10 hours but only running 7.5 productive hours bills 10 hours of operator and loader wages across 7.5 hours of product. If crew and mobile equipment cost 320 dollars per hour and you produce 134 saleable t/h for 7.5 hours, labor and iron alone are 320 x 10 / (134 x 7.5) = 3.18 dollars per ton. Use Belt Load and Conveyor Capacity to confirm the plant can actually sustain the rate you are quoting, otherwise the hours stretch and the per-ton labor climbs.

Fines and off-spec material are scrap in disguise. Every ton of unsaleable minus 4 mm dust still consumed diesel, wear steel, and screen time. If 12 percent of throughput becomes low-value or stockpiled fines, that cost does not vanish, it loads onto the saleable tons. On a plant with a 4.00 dollar per ton all-in cost, 12 percent fines pushes the effective cost on saleable product to 4.55 dollars. Quote with a fines assumption stated explicitly, and revisit it when feed gradation or crusher setting changes.

Haulage and rehandling multiply quietly. Every time material is loaded, conveyed, and dropped it accrues fuel and wear. A loader rehandling stockpile at 0.35 to 0.55 dollars per ton per pass turns a 3-pass plant flow into over a dollar per ton before crushing even starts. Screw Conveyor Throughput and Conveyor Capacity help you design out rehandling by sizing continuous transport correctly, but the estimator's job is to count the passes in the actual site layout and price each one, because a quote drawn on a clean flowsheet always undercounts them.

Overhead and mobilization sink small-tonnage jobs. Plant setup, permits, reclamation bonds, insurance, and site prep might total 60,000 dollars whether you produce 50,000 tons or 500,000 tons. Spread across 50,000 tons that is 1.20 dollars per ton; across 500,000 it is 0.12. This is why contract crushers quote steep minimums. Always separate fixed mobilization from variable per-ton cost in the quote so the customer sees why a short campaign carries a premium, and so you do not lose money if the job shrinks after award.

The defensible quote stacks the layers: variable energy plus wear plus consumables, then labor and equipment per productive hour divided by real saleable rate, then a fines and rehandling allowance, then fixed overhead amortized over committed tonnage, then margin. A hard-rock aggregate quote often lands at 4.50 to 7.50 dollars per ton produced. The mistakes that kill quotes are using nameplate throughput, forgetting wear steel scales with abrasion, and burying fines. State every assumption with a number so that when feed or gradation shifts, you can defend a change order instead of eating the variance.

Published 2026-07-01.