Sheet Breaks are Expensive

Sheet breaks are a pain in the you-know-what and they are probably costing you more than you know.

Let’s take a close look at a very small example:

Mill A is a small recycle facility that makes roughly 65,000 tons/year of boxboard, or about 200 tons/hour.  Let’s assume their cost for recycled paper is $150 per ton and that they experience about two breaks a day.  It takes that mill roughly 20 minutes to get everything back online and back up to speed after a break.

When you run the numbers, this mill is losing – just in terms of the sourcing cost of the paper they utilize – about $300,000 each year.  Their sales loss is significantly higher, probably upwards of $1.2 million dollars each year.  If you assume that about 30% of the breaks are due to variations in freeness,  then the cost of variable freeness at this mill is at least $300,000 each year in lost production.

$300,000.   

And that’s for a small mill with only a couple of breaks a day.  How much paper do you think this mill has to sell to make up for that $300,000?

So, here's a question for you:  

How much money is variable freeness costing you? 

It's a real pain.