Komptech Brand Guidelines: The Styrian Maker of Waste Shredders and Screens

A machine maker built around waste and wood.

Komptech is a maker of machines for treating solid waste and for preparing woody biomass, based at Frohnleiten in the Austrian province of Styria, north of Graz. The company’s profile on the Austrian jobs site karriere.at gives 1992 as its founding year. The Austrian company register, as published on the state platform evi.gv.at, shows Komptech GmbH entered with its seat at Frohnleiten in September 1993.

The founders were Josef Heissenberger and Rudolf Pretzler. The Vienna newspaper Der Standard named them in a report on how the company came back to them. An outside investor, Hannover Finanz Austria, had held shares for seven years; once it sold them to the founders, the planned buy-back was complete and the company was again wholly in family ownership, the paper reported. It described Komptech as a Styrian maker of waste-treatment plant.

German Wikipedia’s entry on the town lists Komptech among local firms as an environmental-technology company making composting machines, and that is one strand of what it does. The company’s karriere.at profile puts it more widely: machines and systems for the mechanical and biological treatment of solid waste, and for preparing woody biomass as a renewable energy source. It says the range covers more than 30 types of machine, and it gives the main stages of waste treatment as shredding and separation among others.

Komptech’s own list of products sorts shredders by type: the Terminator as a single-shaft machine and the Crambo as a dual-shaft machine. It also lists Topturn windrow turners.

A Swedish purchase and a Slovenian plant.

Komptech also bought technology. In May 2006 the trade service EUWID reported that the group, which it called Austro-German, had announced the purchase of Brini Waste Recovery Technology, the Swedish Sita subsidiary and a unit of Sita Sverige AB.

In October 2007 Recycling International described a new range of mobile machines from Komptech for making secondary fuels from commercial waste. A Terminator XF slow-running single-shaft shredder did the first stage, giving what the manufacturer called comparatively fine and homogeneous pre-shredding, the magazine wrote, and the shredded material then passed to a Brini ballistic separator, which split it into four fractions: a light laminar fraction, a rolling three-dimensional fraction and two screen fractions. The light fraction could then be shredded again into fuel.

Production spread too. German Wikipedia’s entry on Ljutomer in Slovenia says a Komptech branch plant was built there in 2006 and opened in 2007, citing a report of the opening. When Recycling International described the company in April 2015, it gave a European headquarters in Austria and further locations in Slovenia and Germany.

Wood has been the other main line. In April 2008 the same magazine reported that Komptech planned to bring out the Chippo 500, a chipper for professional contractors, with a choice of discharge by conveyor belt or by blower, an intake that could take whole trunks, and horizontal and vertical feed drums to draw in bulky green waste. In September 2013 it reported an umbrella name, Green Efficiency, applied to machines with new drive technology, among them the Crambo direct mobile shredders, the electric-driven Cribus drum screens and the stationary Terminator.

Recycling Product News described the Lacero 8010 in June 2024 as a horizontal grinder for North American wood waste, biomass, mulch and organics, on a track chassis with an optional three-axle dolly.

Machines for waste and wood.

Crushing and shredding makers sell machines that are hard to photograph badly. The usual picture is a tracked crusher on a quarry bench, its conveyor throwing stone onto a stockpile, with the plant small against the rock face. A mobile screen in the maker’s signature colour, parked on the same bench, does the work of a logo at a distance, and many of these brands treat paint as part of the identity. Metso, for one, set out its machine colours in a dated release in 2021.

Waste machinery has a different picture. Shredder makers show the inside of the machine: a cut-away rotor with its cutters on display, or bales of plastic heading into a hopper. Compost screens and trommels appear in long windrows, and recycling yards are often shot from a drone, so the sorted heaps form a pattern from above.

Trade fairs give the sector its calendar. Bauma in Munich, CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas and Hillhead in Britain gather the quarry trade, and IFAT in Munich gathers the waste and recycling trade. Metso’s Lokotrack went to Munich in 1986, Metso says, and Powerscreen used CONEXPO and Hillhead to mark its 60th anniversary in 2026. Fair stands are where these brands show new models beside restored old ones, and where dealers, who do much of the selling, meet the factory.

Product names carry unusual weight. Ranges are named as families, and a name can outlast the company that made it: several brands in this guide sit inside larger groups and keep their own names, colours and dealer networks. Ownership changes often, so each entry here gives dates for who owns what, and what each company says about where its machines are made.

Terminator, Crambo, Cribus, Topturn.

Ownership changed again in 2015. EUWID reported on 1 April that year that the Austrian company Hirtenberger was buying an 80 per cent stake in the Komptech group, and Recycling International reported the deal the next day. Hirtenberger Group, based near Vienna, called it its first move into environmental technology. Its chief executive, Stefan Odenthal, said that adding such technologies had been an important goal for its portfolio. Komptech’s chief executive at the time, Heinz Leitner, said the deal strengthened the company’s equity base and that it now had to roll out its solutions to the world market. He said the company had made large investments in new products and in expanding its production sites. German Wikipedia’s entry on Hirtenberger describes Komptech at the time of the deal as about the same size as its buyer.

Today’s register entry for Komptech GmbH at Frohnleiten lists two shareholders: Cleantec Holding GmbH, entered in January 2007, and Astotec Holding GmbH of Hirtenberg, entered in March 2015, the month before the deal was reported. Astotec’s website says it is part of Orasis Industries Holding.

The trade press has followed the company largely by machine name. Recycling International set CHIPPO and BRINI in capitals in 2007 and 2008, and gave Crambo, Cribus and Terminator an initial capital in 2013, under the Green Efficiency label.

For a design guide, Komptech shows how a maker of heavy machines can build recognition through a set of short product names rather than through the company name alone. Compare Vecoplan, a German shredder maker, and UNTHA, an Austrian one. For this guide we use green, wood and pine tones with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Komptech’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.