Round river rock material is best selected by hand sorting for a usable product, and when done so, reduces waste in the total order.  Round, unbroken and unfractured pieces can be best harvested with hand selection versus bulk mechanical screening. Wholesale Stone Solutions offers hand selection for all our products to ensure the end customer receives more usable product per the size and shape of their specifications.  When getting larger river rock cobble in bulk it could be realistic to get up to 30% of pieces that might not meet the size and shape specifications. There also may be a percentage of the weight of the product that is actually dirt & clay fines that may have been stuck to the stone at some point.  For the customer that is paying by the ton, they won’t be satisfied if they have to pay for unusable or “dirty” material. Larger cobble handled in bulk also has negative issues. The product is constantly banging against each other in the mechanical screening and sorting process as well as when it is being loaded and unloaded in the delivery process, which continues to create more fractured pieces.

Hand sorted and palletized goods typically have close to zero waste. In the palletizing process, a wire basket with openings smaller than the material being palletized is mounted on a wooden pallet. The process of palletizing is more precise because typically two crew persons work the system. One person is outside of the pallet handing material to another person inside the pallet who places or stacks them neatly until about halfway full – thus reducing the fractured pieces.  When handing material from one person to another, it eliminates haphazard stacking because the material is not being dropped from above the basket. Both crew persons are working from placing stone into the pallet until full. During hand selection, material is sorted for color, shape and size by hand.  Although the most labor intensive and expensive way to sort rock, it yields the most consistent and cleanest product with very little waste.

When thinking about ordering round rock and cobble – think about hand selection for the best return on your investment.