Shredder
Contents
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?
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 Shredder - 2021 work
- OSE - Open Source Shredder - geardown exploration
- 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
- Open Source Shredder Genealogy
