A shredder is a machine or equipment used for shredding. Shredding systems are used to reduce the size of a given material. While most online dictionaries define the shredder as “a device used for shredding documents as a security measure to prevent identity theft,” shredders can be of many types based on the material being processed.
They are designed to support material reduction across a range of recycling applications, including plastic recycling, scrap metal, e-waste recycling, wood recycling, and tire-shredding or recycling.
They range in size and price from small and inexpensive units designed for a certain amount of pages, to large units used by commercial shredding services that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and can shred millions of documents per hour.
While the very smallest shredders may be hand-cranked, most of them are electrically powered.