Online Only Feature -- Variety Shredding

Greg Conigliaro of Conigliaro Industries Inc., Framingham, Mass., puts it plainly: “It’s a lot of fun shredding stuff.” And he should know.

The company began in 1990 as Conigliaro Engineering, a recycling services firm focused on the removal of paper waste from offices. However, the company changed its focus in 1991 to “total” recycling and incorporated under the name Conigliaro Industries Inc. Since that time, the list of recyclables Conigliaro Industries accepts has expanded to include 150 different plastic, metal, glass, rubber, wood, corrugated, paper and textile materials.

Conigliaro Industries has shred everything from chocolate to mattresses to lamps at its 88,000 square-foot material recovery facility in Framingham.

“Our key shredder is the AZ-80 Shred Pax Shredder,” Conigliaro says. “We utilize that for all of our product destruction activities. It might be any kind of consumer good, clothing, anything at all that we are trying to destroy and render unusable. And then we recycle the constituent parts after it’s shredded.”

Conigliaro Industries also uses the AZ-80 in its new mattress, box spring and furniture recycling program. The AZ-80 shreds these materials to the approximate size of a softball, Conigliaro says. The resulting shred then goes through a couple of picking stations where the bulk of the foam is removed. The remaining material goes under a magnet to remove the metal. The residual material is dumped into a roll-off container and off to landfill, he says.

“I can tell you, the primary purpose of the shredder is to cut through the carcass of the mattress, really. That’s some real tough stuff. It’s very hardened steel, and it goes through it with no problem,” Conigliaro says.

He adds that Conigliaro Industries typically recycles between 60 to 90 percent of a mattress’s volume, depending on its quality.

Conigliaro Industries recently added an Andela Pulverizer to its AZ-80 and ReTech size-reduction equipment. Conigliaro says the company will use the Andela machine to create glass sand. The resulting sand will be combined with the plastic aggregate Conigliaro produces to manufacture Plas-Crete blocks. The blocks will contain 80 percent recycled material and can be used in the construction of retaining walls and storage buildings.