UK waste management firm installs Untha ZR preshredder

United Kingdom-based H. Brown & Son Recycling has invested in a new shredder from Austria-based Untha.

According to a news release from Untha, H. Brown & Son has installed the Untha ZR preshredder at its facility to replace its Untha XR shredder unit, which had been shredding at the facility for 11 years. Untha says the new shredder will process the same input materials—a mix of commercial, industrial and bulky wastes—to turn them into a 200-millimeter fuel for waste-to-energy conversion.

Untha says the two-shaft Untha ZR2400 has been fitted with the H-waste table to suit H. Brown & Son Recycling’s refuse-derived fuel (RDF) setup.

“We were early adopters of Untha’s waste-to-energy equipment, for example, back in the early 2010s, running the XR as a primary shredder and the former TR as a secondary shredder to produce a highly refined [solid recovered fuel] fraction,” says Rod Brown, managing director at H. Brown & Son Recycling. “As the RDF side of our business has grown, we’ve continued to rely heavily on the XR—in fact, it’s probably completed over 18,000 hours of service for us. But when the ZR came out, we thought we’d see what we could achieve with this new technology.”

Marcus Brew, Untha U.K.’s managing director, says the Untha ZR2400 is a low-speed, high-torque machine. Brew says the preshredder features bidirectional shaft rotation, which means the cutters grab, shear and liberate in forward and reverse. He says, “The result is a continuous operation—Browns will always be shredding.”