An industrial shredder is a machine used for reducing the size of all kinds of material. Industrial shredders come in many different design variations and many sizes.

Overview

The main categories of designs used today are as follows: horizontal hammermills, vertical hammermills, slow speed shear type shredders of single, dual, triple and quad shaft design, single shaft grinders of single or dual shaft design, granulators, knife hogs, raspers, mawlers, flails, crackermills, and refining mills.

Some examples of materials that are commonly shredded are: tires, metals, car wrecks, wood, plastics, and garbage. There is no common use of an industrial shredder as they can shred paper as well as wood, plastic, metal including a whole car depending on the size and design of the industrial shredder. The industrial shredder is commonly used to process materials into different sizes for separation or to reduce the recycling cost of transport but a primary use is the upgrading of the material by shredding metals, plastics, aluminium, metal and cars and as well as waste materials such as municipal solid waste or nuclear waste, medical waste, hazardous waste including common garbage.

An industrial shredder is any shredder that can be used in an industrial application (rather than a consumer application). They can be equipped with different types of cutting systems: horizontal shaft design, vertical shaft design, single-shaft, two-shaft, three-shaft and four-shaft cutting systems. These shredders are slow speed or high speed, and are not restricted in being classified as an industrial shredder by their speed or horsepower.

The largest scrap metal shredder in the world was designed with 10,000 hp by the Schnitzer steel group of Portland, Oregon in 1980. The 9,200 hp (6,860 kW) Lynxs at the Sims Metal Management plant at the mouth of the River Usk in Newport, Wales has access by road, rail and sea. It can process 450 cars per hour.^[1][2][3]