Lindner’s expansion backed by a history of innovation

As Lindner expands its global operations, its commitment to developing innovative size-reduction equipment and systems remains intact.


Established in 1948 to serve Austria’s timber industry, Lindner has evolved over the years into a global supplier of premium-quality size-reduction equipment and systems.

When the company was founded, it supplied saws and feeding equipment to timber mills. This led to the development of shredders used to process wood waste into fuel.

From the outset, Josef Lindner, the company’s founder and my grandfather, was committed to the idea that innovation must be at the heart of the business.

His idea was to develop the company by delivering innovative solutions for our customers and ensuring our equipment and systems were of the utmost quality. This approach ensured that customers would benefit not only from better equipment, but also from the lowest possible operating costs.

My grandfather believed that by delivering superior quality for his customers, they would experience increased machine uptime and consistently high throughput. This, in turn, would help to maximize their success as well as that of Lindner’s.

Continuous Development

From those early years, Lindner has continued to invest heavily in ongoing R&D. Today, we continue this tradition, investing 8 percent of annual revenues each year. For us, it’s a nonstop process.

Our innovation and development are not limited to machinery design, however. They extend to sourcing the highest quality materials and components for our machines. We make this investment to ensure our customers receive the greatest possible return for the trust they have placed in us.

As a 100 percent family-owned company with 300 team members globally, we’re fully committed to making sure Lindner customers receive optimal performance every day.

In the early 1980s, Lindner’s innovation program led to the development of our first single-shaft shredder. By 1995, we had implemented our first large-scale recycling plant.

Over the years, we developed a highly flexible modular design program. This allows the heart of our shredders to be sized up or down in a modular fashion, which leverages our highly refined and field-proven designs.

We have also built up an in-house R&D group, for which our team manufactures all core components. All mechanical and electrical engineering and welding are also completely done by Lindner team members, and each project is managed by our in-house project engineering group.

R&D is such an important part of our business that I still manage the team that drives this work. Over time, we have learned that providing new product teams with independent operations and separate work environments improves results. This allows our teams to innovate and more rapidly refine designs without daily production being halted.

It is this same approach that we bring today to Lindner WashTech, a business unit focused on developing highly efficient wash lines for the plastics recycling sector.

(Left) MicroMat: Lindner’s workhorse for plastics and paper processing; (Middle) Urraco: The ideal machine for C&D, scrap, MSW and wood applications; (Right) Jupiter: The industry standard for RDF (refuse derived fuel) and SRF (solid recovered fuel) production

Worldwide Growth

With our roots in Austria, and anchored by three fully dedicated manufacturing facilities, Lindner has expanded dramatically over the years with customers worldwide.

Our first expansion saw Lindner reach the broader European market through our German subsidiary. Then, to better serve a growing customer base in Asia, we initiated Lindner Asia Pacific, which is headquartered in Singapore. And since global expansion is an ongoing strategic initiative for Lindner, we’ve established wholly owned Lindner subsidiaries in both Asia Pacific and North America to grow our footprint in these regions.

This global expansion has been buttressed by ongoing product development: In 2004, we designed the first compact SRF production line; in 2008, we delivered our first plastics recycling solutions; in 2012, we extended our product line to include mobile shredders; and in 2017, our product line grew again with the introduction of our one-step RDF shredder—Polaris—and in 2018 we have introduced the Atlas, a high-volume dual-shaft system. Each stage of product development has been customer driven and anchored in efficient design principles.

A Commitment to the Americas

Beginning in approximately 2012, processors in the United States began sourcing Lindner equipment for its superior performance in RDF production and plastics, paper, C&D, scrap metal and wood processing. It’s these offerings that earned us a loyal and growing customer base throughout the Americas.

Along with serving this base has come the necessity for Lindner to make a deeper commitment to this market. Therefore, in 2017, we consolidated the entities that have been serving the market into Lindner Recyclingtech America (LRA).

In 2018, LRA acquired a facility in Statesville, North Carolina, that has now been outfitted with complete service capabilities, an extensive parts warehouse and a testing facility.

To better serve our customers throughout the United States and Canada, we have also established an important training program. On a six-month rotating basis, we bring technicians and engineers from Austria to work at LRA. These individuals provide the customer support and service required to build our brand in new markets.

This unique program provides two additional benefits. First, our Austrian technicians get to train our growing team at LRA. Second, they learn firsthand the needs and demands of our North American customers.

Our dual-pronged commitment of training factory team members on market requirements while also building a local team is designed to ensure that Lindner’s deep commitment to customer service and satisfaction is maintained.

Today, we invite customers to our Statesville facility to test process their materials or to simply see our commitment firsthand.

We invite you to explore the Lindner product line to see how our size-reduction and systems capabilities can assist your business in experiencing superior uptime reliability, enhanced production and consistent specification for output materials.

November December 2018
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