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Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I live under a rock, but phosphate is expensive. I was buying diammonium phosphate at $250 per ton a few years ago. Then it went to $340. Then COVID happened and it went to $600. Then the next year it was over $800. The ag supply company didn't even have enough cash to pay for a truck load. They've completely stopped carrying it now.

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I'm sorry but you're saying a literal ton, over 2,000lbs, at $600 is expensive? I can't think of any material I can buy a ton of for $600.

Landscaping materials? You can get things like sand and mulch for like $30/ton.

You just have to provide your own transportation.

Salt is about a third the cost. You can get a 1 ton pallet of salt, processed, bagged up and delivered to a business for far less than $600. It is amazing to see in action.

Yea. For other's reference: a tractor trailer can haul something like ~40 tons and costs ~$4k to go cross country, so shipping costs from mine to fertilizer processor to farm are already going to be in the general ballpark of $100/ton.

Mining, as I've known it, uses Haulpak trucks onsite that each carry > 110 tonnes.

They fill a train a day (at least), the trains being some 2.4 kilometers in length carrying some 29,000 tonnes that typically travel some 100km from minesite to coastal port.

Ship capacities are 380,000 to 400,000 tons deadweight and travel about the globe.

"Tractor trailors" (or two to three trailer road trains) as you're describing are used to bring food and supplies and general light goods too and from a minesite.

There are such things as economies of scale.

Fair enough, but the phosphorus has to be delivered to a farm (either before or after being combined into a fertilizer), and that's done with a truck, right? Are you arguing that the total transportation cost of the phosphorus that eventually gets it to the farm where its used is going to be much less $100/ton?

Separately, what term other than tractor trailer should I use to sound cool?

yeah, lightly processed minerals are super cheap; dap sold as fertilizer is full of other crap because phosphate just fucking loves every polyvalent metal ion it ever laid its little orbitals on. fortunately because all that crap is insoluble it's pretty easy to filter out of an aqueous solution

a list of materials that cost less than US$600/tonne, aka 60¢/kg, near me at retail in the last few years:

- steel scrap (30¢)

- aluminum scrap (58¢) (this is what recyclers pay the cartoneros)

fine minerals for cosmetics, pottery, or foundry work:

- bentonite (28¢)

- mesh-80 calcite (45¢)

- mesh-200 calcite (20¢)

- dirty beach sand (6.2¢)

- tierra de Junín for aluminum casting (20¢)

- red clay (30¢)

- ball clay (30¢)

- 200-mesh quartz flour (30¢)

- pure quartz sand (35¢)

- 200-mesh talc (40¢)

- baryta (46¢)

- magnetite (10¢)

- infusorial earth (40¢)

- calcined metakaolin (35¢)

construction binders:

- plaster of paris (30¢)

- slaked lime (11¢)

- portland cement (26¢)

aggregates for construction:

- clean construction sand (2¢)

- pumice (42¢)

- broken-rock aggregate for concrete (8¢)

- ungraded gravel for concrete (0.8¢)

- 6–20 mm gravel for concrete (1¢)

- quartz gravel aggregate for concrete (15¢)

landscaping materials:

- pure white marble pebbles (12¢)

- quartz gravel for landscaping (2.1¢ in minimum quantity 6 tonnes)

- ornamental 1-4 cm landscaping rocks (8¢)

- round 1–3 cm river rocks (9¢)

miscellaneous:

- gravel for fishtanks (19¢)

- water (0.06¢)

materials this cheap vary a lot in price depending on location, because most of the cost is shipping. diammonium phosphate around here is about US$1/kg

i hope this helps

Gravel, $20 a ton.

It highlights how much profit is made on repackaging things into smaller quantities for consumers. Mind you, in the US you have Target which a lot of people go to, because bulk buying is cheaper. We do the same, 5 kilo bags of rice instead of pound bags because we go through enough of it, it's less than half the price of buying pound bags individually.

But if you ever have a larger landscaping job to do, go to a wholesaler, they can deliver tons of materials at your doorstep for relatively cheap.

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