P. Olesen A/S: Our new shredder is cheaper to run and has given us shorter workdays
If you visit P. Olesen A/S’s sorting site in Hasselager, Denmark, you will first and foremost notice the many trucks constantly delivering materials to or collecting materials from it.
As a company specializing in demolition and environmental remediation, P. Olesen's sorting site is a hub for industrial demolition materials as well as bulky waste from Aarhus municipality.
Originally, the site was budgeted for 35 trucks of mixed waste pr. day. To reduce the size of it, and enable sorting and recycling, an M&J PreShred 1000 was installed back in 2013.
“It was a great and reliable machine. We never had any problems with it, it just kept going”, says Foreman Brian Just.
As P. Olesen’s business grew, so did the number of trucks coming to the site daily. That meant long hours for both employees and the shredder to keep up. At one point, the company reached more than 100 truckloads pr. day, and it was no longer enough to work evenings and Saturdays too. A new industrial waste shredder with a higher capacity was needed.
Together for a new generation shredder
So, the team at P. Olesen set out to find a new shredder. In the process, Brian was an advocate for M&J:
“I told our CEO & Head of Operations that I would like to use M&J again. Our other site has a shredder from a different brand, but personally, I am not a fan. M&J is much more powerful and never breaks. Our old Preshredder never had any issues. Never, even when it was running extraordinarily many hours”.
They got in contact with M&J Recycling, which was in the process of developing the M&J P250e - a new electrical shredder, that offered the same power and capacity as the company’s hydraulic shredders but used less energy to power it.
In addition to in-house tests, M&J needed to run tests on a customer’s site to verify the shredder’s capacity and grain size. The team at P. Olesen agreed to take part in the tests and the shredder was moved to Hasselager, where it quickly made an impact:
“The capacity is definitely different, as the new pre-shredder is both larger and more powerful than our old PreShred. And it’s cheaper to run. Personally, I mainly feel the difference in the fact that we can get to the bottom of the waste piles now. We never did that before. That means shorter workdays for me and my colleagues”, says Brian, who enjoyed being part of the testing process:
“It has been fun to be part of the test, to have M&J’s R&D team on speed dial and see how many tonnes the machine could process. Of course, in a business like ours, we are very interested in the capacity and the grain size”.
(the case story continues below the image)
An accident confirmed that M&J was the right decision
Only a few months after the new shredder was installed, an accident happened at the sorting site: A fire broke out outside the workshop and damaged the building, the test shredder’s conveyors and electrical installation, and P. Olesen’s PreShred.
Without any operational shredders, Brian and his colleagues suddenly found themselves in a difficult situation:
“The materials kept coming in and we could not process them. We had to make it work, so we hired external help one week at a time. As soon as he got to the bottom of the pile, it would fill up again. It was a nightmare while it lasted”, says Brian.
Olesen’s original PreShred was fire damaged, and the company was back to looking for a new shredder. Having seen how the external machine performed, Brian was still convinced that M&J was the right decision:
“The shredder we rented from another brand did not perform as well as our M&J on waste. It would not chew through it. I told my colleagues that we should buy what we already had. We knew the P250e worked, and the capacity was good. And since we had not had any issues with it, we should go back to it”.
And so they did.
When the shredder was installed and the workshop reopened, it was cause for great celebration, Brian explained with a smile:
“We celebrated it with “smørrebrød” (ed: open-faced sandwiches). It was a great day”.
Now the sorting site is back to normal and in the rare occasion that P. Olesen needs help with their waste shredder, Brian just picks up the phone:
“M&J is responsible for the service of the shredder. We don’t touch it. We never have. We just pick up the phone and call you guys. It works really well. The service technicians are quickly on site, so our machine is rarely idle. It’s nice to be able to leave service to M&J, so I can focus on running the site”, Brian finishes.
About the company:
Olesen A/S is a family-run company with more than 50 years’ experience in demolition, from total demolition of large industrial buildings to internal demolition as part of renovation projects.
They are specialists within the legislation about demolition and have a strong focus on the environmental, health, and safety aspects of demolition. In 2022, they won an environmental award for their sustainability efforts.