Lowell Plastics manufactures custom park furniture and signage from recycled plastics (primarily shredded milk jugs). Many of the company's customers are municipalities that are required by law to purchase goods that meet certain recycled-content guidelines. (Recycled content can include post-consumer waste materials, pre-consumer waste materials, and recovered materials.) As a result, Lowell Plastics includes two types of direct material charges in its job cost for each job: (1) virgin materials (non-recycled) and (2) recycled content materials. Lowell Plastics also keeps track of the pounds of each type of direct material, so that the final recycled-content percentage for the job can be reported to the customer. The company also reports on the percentage of recycled content to total plastic used each month on its own internal reporting system to help to encourage managers to use recycled content whenever possible.
Lowell Plastics uses a predetermined manufacturing overhead rate of $9 per direct labor hour. Here is a summary of the materials and labor used on a recent job for Norton County:

Requirements
1. Calculate the total cost of the Norton County job.
2. Calculate the percentage of recycled-content materials used in the Norton County job (using pounds). If items purchased by Norton County are required by county charter to contain at least 60% recycled content, does this job meet that requirement?

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Description Virgin materials Recycled-content materials Direct labor Quantity Cost 50 pounds 50 pounds 12 hours $ 4.30 per pound $ 2.60 per pound $ 13.00 per hour