Industrial shredders vary in many ways, according to the function they perform. The internal mechanical processes may include cutting, grinding, hammering and compression. Many shredders also incorporate shaking/sorting mechanisms. Internal machinery may travel in rotary, lateral or vertical directions. Speeds of the internal processes also vary widely, to suit the materials the machines will be handling. Shredders can be partially categorized by the type of process or processes they employ.
Grinders
Grinders use abrasion, often combined with compression to pulverize materials, usually to produce granular products. Wheels, drums and plates may be used in the processes. These may be either high or low speed machines, according to the type of material they are intended for.
Chippers
Chippers normally use high speed rotary knives to reduce materials to flakes or chips. They can be manually or automatically fed, and may be single or multiple stage machines. They may also employ single or multiple drums or wheels with single or multiple knives.
Granulators
Granulators are employed mostly for plastic recycling from production processes like injection molding. These units use knives, rather than abrasive surfaces to reduce parts or trimmings, etc. to fine particles that can them be reused easily in the production lines. Some granulators are equipped with thermoforming units that form the output into easily handled scrap or production parts. Granulators vary widely in size and mechanics according to the type of industry, types of materials handled, and the location in which they will be used.
Hammermills
Hammermills are used to shatter or pulverize materials. The most common configuration is a chamber containing a rotary drum with swiveling hammers of hardened bar or chain. The chamber is typically gravity-fed, and output screens control the size of particle produced. Hammer material, configuration and distribution, and rotation speed are a few of the factors that determine the type of material that can be processed.
Shear Shredders
Shear Shredders employ rotary cutters or guillotine-style knives to cut materials rather than pulverizing, chipping or grinding. Shears can be found in many different configurations for different industries. Feed types, speeds and type and number of knives differ according to the applications.
Specialty Shredders
Specialty Shredders that are designed for a particular type of material may utilize combinations of the above processes or unique devices developed especially for that material. Tire shredders, for instance, typically use one or more rotary shafts or screws, with interlocking lugs, cams, teeth or blades. The feed is configured to force the tires between the shafts or the shaft and machine surfaces, where the lugs, etc. forcefully tear the tire into small pieces. The shafts are generally rotated at low speeds, under very high torque.
Other special purpose applications present challenges that require unique design features in shredding equipment. Shredders for safe disposal of medical refuse require extremely close tolerances, to render sharps, tape and other small waste products into particles too small to be recognized. Medical waste shredders usually employ rotary grinders to ensure this. Since medical waste is usually sterilized before destruction, these machines often need to incorporate a method for dealing with liquids.
Secure, high technology applications often require the destruction of waste within a clean room. This requires special filtering and dust traps to maintain the dust-free environment.
Fibrous waste and thin sheet goods such as plastic films may present problems for conventional shredders. Specialized shredders are available for reconstitution and recycling of both these types of material.
“All-Purpose” Shredders
'All Purpose' Shredders are the heart of major demolition operations and many municipal recycling programs. The machinery usually consists of large, very low speed, high-torque shafts or drums with carbide cams or studs, sometimes equipped with hydraulic rams to assist with the feed. Many of these shredders are capable of reducing entire refrigerators, cars, or other oversized equipment to small pieces in a single pass. They are most often combined with external systems that remove hazardous liquids, gases or solids, sort metals from other materials and otherwise prepare the shredded material for disposal and/or reuse.
Shredder Advantages
As mentioned briefly above, there may be great advantages to using shredders within your business operations or community. While some advantages will be readily apparent, others may require some explanation. Industrial shredders are helping companies and communities address issues from economics to protecting the environment on many fronts.
Fiscal Advantages
In today’s economic climate, businesses and communities are pressed to find new ways to cut costs and increase revenues. Shredders may provide new strategic options to help relieve financial pressures and may offer the opportunity to produce new income streams. Let’s look at some examples:
Production waste recovery
Any manufacturing process produces a finite amount of waste. While most companies adopt practices or modifications that minimize this waste, the small amount of raw material that’s lost in processes like molding, punching, casting or trimming is often considered to be a necessary loss. Modern shredder technologies, however, may provide a way to recover most of that loss.
For instance, in an injection molding process, if only 2% of the injected plastic is trimmed in cleaning up the product and a production line uses 2lbs. of styrene for each product, that translates to 0.64oz. of plastic per product. At first glance, this may seem to be an acceptable loss. However, in an operation that produces 3,000 products per day:
.64 X 3,000 = 1,920oz. / 16 = 120lbs. of raw material lost per day
120 / 2lbs. per product = 60 products lost per day
While this example may not be accurate for a given business, it nevertheless provides a basis for examining the feasibility of recovering lost material. Multiply the number of lost products per day by the net profit per product and it may be easy to justify a means to recover the waste.
In this example, the manufacturing company may benefit from the installation of a granulator or granulators within the molding shop. Modern granulators can be installed in-line or centrally, to facilitate the best solution for a given location. Recovered material can then be fed directly back into the process or used to provide the raw material for other processes, such as thermoformed parts.
Saving recycling costs
Environmental impact is a major concern, so much so that many states have instituted laws that make recycling of many waste products mandatory for homes and businesses alike. Unfortunately, while most business owners are environmentally conscious and happy to comply with these regulations, the cost of recycling can often be a burden. Commercial recycling costs are rising at an astounding rate. With an estimated cost of $50 to over $150 per ton to commercially recycle most materials, cost effectiveness of an outside service may be hard to calculate.
Many companies are realizing cost savings by implementing their own recycling programs. In general, businesses create considerable amounts or recyclable waste in their operations, and the support of operations. From containers for raw materials to break room beverage containers, to packing materials, pallets and more, recyclables creep into the workplace from several directions. By installing proper shredders for the types of material that pass through your business, the cost of disposal can be greatly reduced and perhaps eliminated. In many cases, recycling can offset operating costs through the re-use or sale of the shredded waste. This brings us to the next category:
Generating new income streams
Industrial shredders may bring new revenue to business operations by the generation of new products or raw materials. These products or materials can be used within the processes of the business, used to create new product lines or marketed directly.
The lumber and building materials industry has come to make wide use of this concept. Culled pieces of wood that are unacceptable in board stock are chipped, combined with resins and pressed into wafer board, used extensively for sheathing, decking and floor underlayment in building construction. Even sawdust is collected and processed similarly to create particle board, a dense, relatively inexpensive sheet goods product with hundreds of building industry uses.
Composite materials of recycled granulated plastic and wood fibers are being engineered with advantages over traditional lumber such as light weight, higher strength and mold/mildew resistance. Chipped, shredded or ground bark dust can be resold for landscaping. Chips not reused are resold to paper mills. Fine chips or sawdust are processed into pellets for wood stoves.
Not every industry will enjoy this many options for using waste materials, but these examples may provide the spark necessary to see how putting industrial shredders, chippers or grinders to work in your own operations might generate substantial extra income for your business.
Reduction of community development costs
Today’s real estate developers and architectural companies make use of shredding equipment on building sites to provide many of the advantages we’ve mentioned above. The results are immediate savings in disposal of recyclable products, reuse of building materials as landscaping and fill products, and even the use of packing materials as efficient, low-cost insulation. For those waste products that still need to be recycled commercially, many recyclers offer substantial discounts for prepared scrap and some will purchase and collect processed scrap.
Many contractors and developers own portable shredding equipment and large, micro-community projects often allow builders to make use of permanently installed shredders.
As with any investment for your business, purchasing shredding equipment deserves careful consideration. Costs for industrial shredding equipment can be substantial and careful analysis of cost versus benefits needs to be performed. In many cases, the financial rewards can offset or outweigh the costs, if the equipment is used to its full potential.
Environmental Advantages
In today’s world, being “green” is ever-increasingly more important. Our impact on the environment individually, corporately and as a community weighs heavily on how we’re perceived by our clients, our friends and associates and the general public. Consumers in today’s market are more likely to deal with businesses that demonstrate environmental responsibility. New standards for cleaner community living have created new concerns for developers and municipalities. Federal, state and local governments offer incentive programs for energy efficiency and waste reduction. Industrial shredders play an important role in helping meet the challenges of becoming environmentally friendly.
Fewer, cleaner landfills
Shredding provides easier handling of recyclable waste, thereby encouraging more consistent recycling. In many cases, shredded materials can be reused directly within the operations or communities that disposed of them, resulting in less overall waste output. By combining shredding equipment with hazardous waste disposal and recycling, the introduction of heavy metals, toxins and other hazardous materials into landfills is greatly reduced.
For materials that are committed to landfills, shredding allows for greater compaction of non-bio-degradable components, creating a more stable fill and allowing disposal of more waste in less area. Most organic wastes can be composted and reused after shredding, eliminating thousands of tons of input to landfills per year and providing valuable resources for consumers.
Preservation of natural resources
Shredding waste allows reuse of metals, reducing the need for new ore mining and helping preserve our natural resources as well as our landscapes. Scrap yards, metal fabrication shops and even the auto recycling industry use shredding equipment to provide mills with clean, recyclable metals in a form that’s easy to transport and incorporate into their smelting processes.
Processing of waste lumber for engineered and composite materials saves our forests. Incorporation of granulated plastics helps extend the useful life of composite building materials, reducing the need to produce more lumber. This also contributes to a reduction in the use of sawmill kilns, and the fuel they consume.
Reduction of emissions
Industrial shredding of waste provides opportunities to lower greenhouse gases and toxic emissions on several fronts, some of which may not be immediately obvious.
As an example, in the past, it was a common practice to burn tires at dump sites before burying the leftover sludge and slag in landfills. Burning vulcanized rubber produces acrid, toxic smoke that drifts for miles and carries fallout pollutants that return to the soil and the water supply. With the introduction of tire shredders, used tires can be recycled as useful products without harmful effects.
Landfill methane is among the most common greenhouse gases. U.S. landfills have been estimated to pour as much as 450-650 billion cubic feet of methane per year into the atmosphere. By incorporating recycling programs aided by the use of shredding equipment, we can reduce the amount of organic waste producing those methane levels.
Wood smoke is a major contributor to pollution levels in metropolitan areas around the world. By using shredders to convert waste wood products into pellets and briquettes, cleaner burning, more efficient fuels are created for wood stoves and fireplaces, thus reducing the amount of wood smoke introduced into the atmosphere.
Mining and ore smelting operations are also major contributors to air pollution, through the burning of fossil fuels in their operations and support equipment. By recovering shredded metals for recycling, we lower the emissions produced by mills and mining operations.
One less obvious reduction in emissions is through reduced transportation requirements. As companies adopt in-house recycling programs, many shredded materials are reused in their own processes, sold, or reduced to a much more manageable size for easy packaging or hauling. Eliminating the need to transport some waste and reducing the bulk of hauled waste means less fuel burned by trucks, trains, planes and ships to move those materials. By recycling waste products, fuel consumption in the manufacture and shipping of new products is also reduced.
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