Key takeaways
- The bench contributes roughly $1,685 a month directly — modest for a full-time position and a corner of the building.
- Its real value is that it lets grading be strict, because borderline boxes have a destination worth eight dollars rather than one.
- It also lets us buy damaged accumulations that pure resellers must decline, which gets us access to the good boxes in the same load.
- Repairable: joints, flaps, staples, corner tabs, sleeves and bases. Not repairable: crushed edges, delamination, moisture, odour.
The bench is one person, a pneumatic stapler, reinforced gummed tape, patch stock and a sleeve press. It processes roughly eleven hundred boxes a month. Looked at on its own, the margin is thin enough that a sensible accountant would question it.
The direct arithmetic
| Line | Quantity | Rate | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boxes rehabilitated | 1,100 | — | — |
| Labour | 168 hours | Loaded cost | −$4,700 |
| Materials — tape, staples, patch stock | — | — | −$1,150 |
| Value as 4A rejects if baled instead | 1,100 | ≈ $1.05 | −$1,155 forgone |
| Value as 3A stock after repair | 1,100 | ≈ $7.90 | +$8,690 |
| Net contribution | +$1,685 |
Positive, but modest — about fifteen hundred dollars a month for a full-time position and a corner of the building. On that basis alone you would probably not build it.
The indirect effects, which are larger
It lets grading be strict
This is the big one. A yard with no repair route has a quiet incentive to grade borderline boxes upward, because the alternative is baling them at a dollar. With a bench, a borderline box has a home that pays eight dollars — so the grader can call it honestly and nobody loses.
Grading discipline is the product. Anything that protects it is worth more than its own margin.
It changes what we can buy
We can offer money for damaged accumulations that pure resellers have to decline. That gets us access to whole loads — including the good boxes in them — that we would otherwise never see, because customers overwhelmingly prefer one collection to two.
It supplies the cutting table
Boxes that fail even at the bench get triaged for sound panels rather than going straight to the baler. That is where the six per cent fabrication share comes from, and fabricated parts are worth roughly forty times baled board.
The bench does not make money. It makes the rest of the building honest, and that is what we actually sell.
What it can and cannot fix
- Repairable: opened manufacturer joints, split or missing flaps, failed staple lines, damaged corner tabs, surface punctures away from the vertical edges, sound base with worn body or the reverse.
- Not repairable: crushed or rounded vertical edges, delamination, moisture above about twelve per cent, contamination or odour.
The dividing line is structural. Vertical edges and the bonds between plies carry the load; everything else is, literally, surface work.
Toll repair for customers
Customers with a consistent box frequently send their own containers in rather than buying replacements. At roughly two to four dollars a box against seven to eleven for used replacement stock, and twenty-one for new, it repays itself on the first trip after repair — provided the damage is on the repairable list.
We triage and report what is not repairable rather than quietly discarding it, because a customer who sent a hundred boxes and got seventy back deserves to know what happened to the other thirty.
Questions