Lindner has developed, produced and installed shredders and system solutions, both mobile and stationary, to process waste streams. Now more than ever, the focus is on energy efficiency, productivity and the economically viable transformation of the old into new. This includes plastics, waste wood recycling and the production of high calorific solid recovered fuels. The technology is developed in house, by Lindner’s R&D team, yet Lindner’s customers also benefit from its cooperative research projects. One of these is the lead project, ‘circPLAST-mr’, carried out with universities and other industry parties to find solutions for mechanical recycling.

The EU's Green Deal, specifying recycling quotas, and the drive to keep secondary raw materials in the cycle for as long as possible, are shaping the waste management industry just as much as the shortage of skilled workers, rising energy costs and the demand for higher productivity. Lindner provides individual and comprehensive system solutions, which make it possible to separate raw materials from various waste streams. The non-recyclable material is transformed into another raw material – medium and high calorific alternative fuel – in the secondary shredding process and with the additional use of quality monitoring.

Lindner states that especially with regard to the recovered plastics, more waste processors are recognising the additional value that can be created. Together with Lindner Washtech, Lindner has been operating in this segment for many years. The cornerstone for plastics recycling is the coordination of the four process steps shredding, sorting, washing and drying. In this way, it is possible to install comprehensive plants (to date, more than 200 plastics recycling plants have been put into operation) to recycle PE-LLD films, PE-HD bottles, PP household goods and so forth. Europe's first independent research centre, the National Test Centre Circular Plastics, has also chosen Lindner lines.

Under the project management of the Johannes Kepler University Linz, eleven scientific and fourteen company partners, including Lindner, are working on how to obtain high quality recyclates from used plastics. Experts from all areas of plastics recycling have been brought together to make use of possible synergies. In total, the research programme is divided into seven work packages. Lindner has taken the industrial lead in the material flow processing work package and joining with Alpla in order to be able to sort and clean packaging better. The latest technological innovations are used here, which are not yet available on the market.

In the research project, different tasks are being investigated and researched in several test series. In this way, it should be possible to optimise plastics recycling and optimally adapt Lindner's solutions to the market and customer needs.