Shredder is a piece of equipment used for roughly shredding big pieces of waste/scrap material into smaller sizes prior to the granulating process. Along with people’s increased awareness of environmental protection as well as the development of recycling technology, shredder plays a more and more important role in the recycling process. Most localities have laws regarding how to transfer and dispose of large volumes of manufacturing, office and even household waste, and shredder helps related parties/companies meet these regulations by reducing large sizes of waste into smaller sizes.
Industrial shredders nowadays are used in a wide range of applications including waste paper, tires, plastic, wooden scrap, e-waste, metallic scrap, hazardous waste, and even animal bones. These shredders are basically made of steel material and equipped with cutting shaft(s) inside the machine chamber for tearing up waste material. Categorized by the number of cutting shafts, there are single-shaft shredders, double-shaft shredders, and four-shaft shredders.
Single-shaft shredder, also known as single-rotor shredder, is equipped with one high-speed cutting rotor and also a horizontal hydraulic trolley to push material close to the cutting rotor for efficient shredding. Single-rotor shredder is quite a versatile shredding equipment and it is suitable for shredding almost all types of waste material and even whole bales of paper and plastic.
Double-shaft shredders are designed with two biting shafts, featuring high torque, capable of shredding almost all types of soft, high-resilient and hollow wastes.
Four-shaft shredder is built with four biting shafts in the machine chamber, and it is known as the most powerful shredding equipment that is normally used for shredding extremely stubborn material such as heavy truck tires, large plastic/metal drums, etc.
There is also a kind of shredder that is integrated with granulating/crushing function, which makes the shredding and granulating process done in one machine. Such a machine is a very good choice for waste conversion plants.
Nowadays shredders come in different sizes and shapes to meet different demands and different scales of recycling.
Please refer to our topic «How to choose a suitable plastic shredder» for some guidelines to choose a proper shredder for your specific need.
