Shredding Machine
Shredding machines are mechanical devices for various types of material, including metal, drums, paper, plastic, cloth, and wood.
Quick links to Shredding Machine Information
Benefits of Shredding Machines
Industrial manufacturers accumulate metal items, pack bins, pack rolls of plastics, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, cans, and drums, which can often be reused. Shredding is often a solution when it cannot be reused. Industrial shredding offers multiple benefits in addition to being useful for size reduction. These machines are useful for recycling the product and shredding solids to ensure that other machines or processes run smoothly in addition to offering document security.
Other benefits include:
- Increase Security
- Reduce Waste Volume
- Reduce Costs
- Increase Efficiency
Shredding Machine Design
There are four types of ways shredders cut: shearing, tearing, fracturing, and optimum action.
- Shearing uses scissor mechanisms to cut up the material. Shearing depends on the sharpness of the blades.
- Tearing involves pulling apart material with force until they pull apart.
- Fracturing is a shredding method used on glass and plastic that involves shattering the material.
- Optimum action uses all three other types of cut at once.
Ductile materials tend not to be easily fractured. Examples are cloth, rubber, soft plastics, paper, soft metals, and cardboard. These materials are better disposed of using shearing. Friable materials are easily fractured, such as stone, glass, cast metals, or wood.
Additionally, shredders feed in one of two ways: batch or meter. Batch feeding involves dropping large masses of material into the machine. They are more likely to clog or take on more than they can shred.
Types of Shredding Machines
- Plastic Shredders
- Often grinders, chippers, shear shredders, granulators, hammer mills, and all-purpose shredders.
- Tire Shredders
- Designed for shredding old tires into landfill covers, boiler fuels, rubberized asphalt, and various other products. This can be done using shear shredders, specialty shredders, grinders, chippers, and granulators.
- Paper Shredders
- Designed to shred and dispose of commercial and industrial paper waste. This can be done using strip-cut shredders, industrial paper shredders, and cross-cut shredders. They are used by government organizations, businesses, and private individuals to destroy private, confidential, or otherwise sensitive documents. They range in size and price from small and inexpensive units designed for only a few pages at a time.
- Hammermills
- Heavy-duty shredders used for mass shredding. They utilize rotating hammers that pulverize paper through a screen. The hammers may have knife blades, blunt edges, or a combination of the two. Users can change the screen size to fit their particular needs. With the right screen in place, a hammer mill can reduce paper to dust.
- Wood Chipper
- A heavy-duty machine that reduces the wood into tiny pieces. Typically, trunks and tree limbs are placed through a wood chipper and turned into wood chips. The machine can be mounted on wheels to be towed by a truck.
- Scrap Metal Shredder
- Used to reduce the size of scrap metal to be disposed of or recycled. These are commonly used for tin cans, iron, copper tubes, coins, computers, bulk drums, tin, and electrical boxes.
- Single Shaft Shredder
- A single shaft shredder has fewer rotating blades but can still handle:
- Pallets (Wood and Plastic)
- Rolls of Rubber
- Tree Limbs
- Excess Injection Molding Materials (Molding, Sprues, etc.)
- Dual Shaft Shredder
- Also called a double shaft shredder, this design has two blade shafts and can shred large products that are light and preferably hollow, such as:
- Most Forms of Construction, Demolition, and Hazardous Waste
- Glass
- Tires
- Drum Containers (Steel and Plastic)
- Wood
- Textiles (and Fibers)
- Televisions
- Computers
- Small Office Machines Like Fax Machines and Printers