Rapid Granulator launches line of shredders

Düsseldorf, Germany — A Swedish company, long known for its work in recycled plastic granulation, is pushing into the shredder market for the first time ever.

Rapid Granulator AB used K 2016 to launch the company's line of shredders dubbed the Raptor Series, which uses cutting edges based on its own granulation technology.

The Bredaryd, Sweden-based company is keenly focused on the plastics recycling industry. The firm previously partnered with other shredder companies that provided more general service machines that worked in a variety of applications, including wood, waste and post-industrial.

But Rapid Granulator says its Raptor Series is specifically designed for the plastics market.

Blades in the shredder claw at the recycled material, creating a more uniform “chip” that then can be fed into a granulator for further size reduction. This clawing action, which Rapid Granulator says is less violent and disruptive than other shredder techniques, cuts down on dust and irregular-sized pieces.

“We've been using shredders in combination with Rapid Granulators for over 30 years. But we had been sourcing them from the market,” said Bengt Rimark, global sales and marketing director.

“Our main target customers,” he said, are those in the plastics industry who want “high-quality regrind out of the scrap material” that can be fed right back into processing through a closed-loop system.

“Compared to most shredders on the market, we are cutting the material like a scissor rather than tearing the material apart,” Rimark explained. “And there's a big difference, especially for our customer base.”

It's all about size reduction, first shredding into larger pieces and then granulating into a size similar to pellets. This allows the clean material to go right back through the system without any production waste.

Jim Hoffman is vice president of sales and marketing for Rapid Granulator in the United States. It's part of his job to know the Raptor Series inside and out.

And he does.

“It's not as violent an action as there is in a traditional shredder. It's a much more controlled cut, so it's much more precise. Therefore, it's cleaner. And that's really what our primary objective is — to provide solutions that give you high-quality shredded and granulated material and that give you the most product you can use. You are not losing product to the process,” he said.

“What's important is we've focused on plastic rather than being a general purpose shredder,” Hoffman said. “We targeted and have been very polymer-specific. But it's designed with all plastics in mind.”

The Raptor Series comes in 36 different base configurations, allowing customers to pick from different widths and chamber sizes and rotor diameters.

The company's decision to go after the shredder market comes after a change of ownership about 18 months ago when Lifeco AB of Enköping, Sweden, took control.

“They are super-focused on product development. What they said is we need to release resources to develop the next generation of machinery,” Rimark said. “In a year and a half, we have produced not only a shredder, but a platform of 36 base shredder configurations.

“We have plastic in our DNA. That's the only thing we are focused on. So we have to make sure that our customers can convert the scrap material into high-quality regrind. Because the high-quality regrind that doesn't affect the production negatively has the same value as the virgin raw material,” he said. “Here is the magic formula.”