GCM Enviro’s Tana Shark shredder is providing operators with high-powered versatility, as the resource recovery sector gears up for an influx of new material streams.
With the passing of its first ever national waste legislation in December 2020, Australia entered into a new generation of product stewardship.
The new laws will improve existing regulatory frameworks by encouraging companies to take greater responsibility for the waste they generate through the products they design, manufacture and distribute.
While this new approach will produce untold environmental benefits, it will also increase demand on waste and resource recovery operators – tasked with processing materials not previously seen in such high volumes.
The Australian Bedding Stewardship Council received funding to launch a national scheme for mattresses and bedding, for example, suggesting an influx of notoriously difficult to manage bulky mattresses is on the horizon.
Mattresses have traditionally presented challenges for recycling facilities as they do not compact easily and contain multiple waste streams including wood, textiles, foam and metals.
As such, to process the material in an environmentally and economically efficient manner, resource recovery facilities require high-powered and versatile equipment, such as the Tana Shark 440DT waste shredder.
Available in Australia through equipment distributor GCM Enviro, the Tana Shark enables full control of particle size from 50 to 500 millimetres.
According to GCM’s Adam Krajewski, this facilitates time and cost savings, as the machine can perform shredding in just one pass.
“The high torque and half-cutting effect of the Tana Shark can easily destroy 160 mattresses an hour, making the shredder perfectly suited to operators looking to capitalise on the upcoming product stewardship scheme,” he says.
Through the magnetic separation of metals, the Tana Shark can facilitate an additional revenue stream for operators, as the valuable metals can be sold for further recycling.
In optimum conditions, the Tana Shark Shredder 440DT is capable of processing and removing all steel from mattresses at a rate of 160 to180 units an hour. Engineered to be robust and reliable, they are designed to minimise dust and ensure user safety when operational.
The Tana Shark is suited to variety of waste streams in addition to mattress, including tyres, green waste, plastics and construction and demolition waste.
They have the added ability of not only pre-shredding products, but also outputting a single end product with one pass.
“While shredders were historically designed for narrow, specific applications, as requirements and processes are constantly changing, Tana designed its Shark shredders to be as multi-purpose as possible,” Krajewski says.
“It really is one of the most versatile shredders on the market.”
For better control of shredding operations, the TANA Shark weighs shredded materials on the conveyor in real time. The shredder’s control system then monitors and controls all machine functions, with 12 pre-programmed operating programs available for different material types and processes.
For volume reduction and pre-shredding purposes, up to two thirds of the counter knives can be replaced with half knives, which result in bigger end product size and higher capacity.
The end product size and quality can be determined and finalised by using a rotor screen with suitable mesh size out of the five available. The suitable size is defined by the characteristics of the material and the wanted end product size.
The shredder also benefits from adjustable rotor to screen clearance, which can be narrowed down to one millimetre.
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