Success stories

India generates a large amount of agricultural waste, including crop residues. As burning organic waste is considered to be a major cause of air pollution, the government of India has been offering incentives to mitigate the pollution problem and convert rice straw that is widely available in India into biogas. “Especially in northern part of India, rice straw will be an important raw material for biogas production”, says Neelesh Desai, Managing Director of BHS-Sonthofen India.

BHS-Sonthofen has delivered recycling technology for an SMP plant in Wuxi City of Jiangsu province, China. Toxic industry waste is usually disposed together with the packaging – for example steel drums or big bags. Roten, the company responsible for building the recycling plant, asked for solutions for the first step of the recycling process, which is the shredding of waste materials delivered in big bags. The customer's main requirement was high machine availability. BHS-Sonthofen opted for a two-stage shredding process with shearing shredder VR 1215 (hydraulic drive) and VR 0912 (electrical drive).

BHS-Sonthofen has developed a new procedure for processing meatballs in order to increase the amount of copper recovered. Electric motors and motor armatures represent a small fraction of waste from incineration or large shredders, and it is difficult to cleanly separate them by type. Yet they contain a good deal of valuable copper, whose share is up to 22 percent. This impressive new procedure features a Rotorshredder optimized for this process, subsequent materials separation and copper processing using a rotor impact mill.

The Association for Waste Management Kempten put a biomass treatment plant into operation in 2019. Technology worth about €2.8 million in total ensures that foreign matter is optimally removed from organic waste and green waste to prepare it for fermentation. A BHS-Sonthofen Biogrinder is now used to process and shred this material. Its low power consumption and exceptional shredding results, even for challenging input material, are what make it stand out.

Since March 2019, a BHS-Sonthofen rotor impact mill (type RPMX) has been in operation at Jansen Shredder Recycling BV in Moerdijk, the Netherlands, for the fine processing of automotive shredder residues (ASR). Thanks to years of experience in the processing of metal-bearing waste materials, the experts from Sonthofen found the optimal solution for processing abrasive materials. Wear costs at Jansen have significantly decreased since.

Kajaanin Romu Oy operates one of Finland’s most cutting-edge plants for recycling scrap in the town of Kajaani, located approximately 500 km northeast of Helsinki. The company commissioned a BHS-Sonthofen plant for processing automotive shredder residue (ASR) fine fractions of particle sizes between 0 and 30 mm. It separates the feed material abundant with valuable metals into ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ fractions in a single pass. This allows the plant operators to economically produce fractions that can be sold profitably. Moreover, the plant significantly reduces the cost of material disposal at landfills.