Shredder

Basics

• A Device Consisting Typically of Two Axis With Opposing Blades
• These essentially act as shears and continously cut sections of the inserted material
• It is useful for reducing small chunks of something into flakes

Use Cases

Disaster Relief

• Occasionally used to reduce non-concrete rubble/debris

Metal

Recycling, particularly of metal scrap, will require an industrial-strength shredder. If you haven't seen one of these awesome machines in action, what are you waiting for?

Watch it shred!

Scrap metal is anything that's "51% metal."

• First, sort things for shredding.
• Second, put them in the shredder.
• Third, take the bits of metal and process them in a mini-mill.

Recycling ferrous metal is waaay more efficient than mining and refining it.

A small or light-duty shredder can be extremely useful for recycling waste plastic for use in moulding, extruding or 3D Printing. This open-hardware one has been published on GrabCAD, but the tooling is a bit intensive (e.g. cutting threads onto each end of a tool-steel hexagonal bar), so I'm working on an even cheaper one. 4ndy (talk) 13:16, 7 June 2014 (CEST)

Organic Waste

• Shredd wood, clippings, and even dead animals

Open Source Designs

• OSE - Open Source Shredder
• Precious Plastic: Precious Plastic Shredder. https://preciousplastic.com/en/videos/build/shredder/

Commercial

• Komar
• Global Recycling Equipment says "anyone" can have a shredder for $250K.
• Shred-Tech provides some case studies.

Internal Links

• Hammermill - similar use case, more often makes a powder. Also tends to need more brittle feedstocks