What Materials Are Best Processed by a Spiral Shredder

In soft-material recycling, the difficulty is rarely the cutting force itself, but how the material behaves during shredding. Many recyclers discover that conventional high-speed shredders work well for rigid plastics or metals, yet struggle badly when faced with soft, flexible, fibrous, or easily entangled waste. This is exactly where the spiral shredder shows its value—not as a general-purpose machine, but as a solution built around material behavior.

The first category that clearly benefits from spiral shredding is plastic film and flexible packaging waste.
Agricultural mulch film, PE film, stretch film, plastic bags, woven bags, and jumbo bags all share similar problems: they are light, flexible, and prone to wrapping around shafts or bridging inside the chamber. In a high-speed system, these materials often cause frequent stoppages and uneven output. A spiral shredder approaches the problem in a different way. Its low-speed, high-torque spiral cutter continuously pulls the material inward, applying compression and tearing rather than impact cutting. This controlled action prevents wrapping and allows film-type materials to be reduced in size steadily and predictably.

A second major group includes textile and fiber-based materials, such as used clothing, nonwoven fabrics, carpets, curtains, nylon fibers, polypropylene fibers, glass fiber fabrics, and palm fibers.
These materials are not difficult to cut, but they are extremely easy to tangle. Long fibers tend to bind together, resisting conventional blade geometries. The helical arrangement of cutters in a spiral shredder creates a progressive tearing motion, separating fibers while maintaining feeding continuity. This makes the machine particularly effective for textile recycling lines, where stable pre-shredding is essential before washing, opening, or granulation.

The spiral shredder is also highly suitable for soft industrial and consumer waste that combines elasticity, thickness, and irregular shapes. Examples include ropes, fishing nets, PP or PET packing straps, sponge pads, pet training pads, shoes, foam boards, and automotive interior materials. These materials often defeat standard shredders by absorbing energy or rebounding instead of cutting cleanly. In a spiral shredder, continuous compression and shear gradually break down the structure of such waste, delivering consistent size reduction without sudden load spikes or mechanical stress.

What links all these materials is not their industry origin, but their mechanical behavior: low density, high flexibility, strong tendency to wrap, and poor response to high-speed cutting. A spiral shredder is designed precisely around these characteristics. By operating at low speed and high torque, it prioritizes control over aggression, ensuring stable feeding, reduced wear, and predictable output.

From a process perspective, spiral shredders are most commonly used as primary size-reduction or pre-treatment machines. They efficiently reduce bulky waste volume, making transport and storage easier, while producing a uniform output size—typically adjustable between 10–50 mm or 30–50 mm—suitable for downstream granulation, washing, or separation. In many recycling plants, one spiral shredder can replace multiple material-specific machines, simplifying the line layout and reducing operational complexity.

In practice, choosing a spiral shredder is less about capacity on paper and more about understanding material behavior. When the waste stream is soft, fibrous, flexible, or prone to entanglement, the spiral shredder is not just an option—it is often the most reliable and economical choice.

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