Lindner Brand Guidelines: The 1948 Sawmill-Machinery Firm That Turned to Shredders

A Carinthian machine works changes trade.

Lindner is based in Spittal an der Drau, in the Austrian province of Carinthia, and the company dates itself to 1948. It says it began as a maker of machines and plants for the wood industry. Trade reports from September 2020, in Global Recycling and from the trade site Polyform Next, describe the same start in slightly looser terms: a Maschinenfabrik Lindner working in sawmill machinery in the 1940s.

The change of trade came four decades later. In the late 1980s, those reports say, the firm was among the first to focus on shredding and processing waste, and so became Lindner Recyclingtech. The wording originates with the company, which also calls itself a “recycling pioneer” in its releases. HUB-4 magazine, reporting from Spittal in its September/October 2019 issue, credited Lindner with designing, building and installing the first line for refuse-derived fuel in Germany in the late 1990s.

The legal name is Lindner-Recyclingtech GmbH, written with a hyphen. In the market, and in its own product copy, the company is simply “Lindner,” and the website sits at lindner.com. The slogan on that site’s home page is “Make the most of waste.” A 2025 company release uses “Lindner Group” for the wider business that includes its washing-plant arm.

Static shredders came first. In 2012, Managing Director Michael Lackner told HUB-4, the company launched a mobile range, and that led to a new plant at Feistritz an der Drau in 2016, where all mobile shredders were then being built. In 2019 he counted three production sites in Austria: the original Spittal works, an electrical and electronic engineering site in the same town, and Feistritz. It also had a German sales and service subsidiary and a North American site.

The next step was a new headquarters. The company broke ground on a new site of more than 45,000 square metres on 18 September 2020, Industry Sourcing reported, and Recycling Product News covered its official opening in 2023. That event also marked the firm’s 75th anniversary.

Named Series, Stationary and Mobile.

Lindner’s machines are sold under names rather than codes, and they are grouped by job. The website lists stationary primary shredders such as the Jupiter, secondary shredders such as the Komet, one-step machines such as the Polaris and universal shredders such as the Micromat. The company describes its range as running from stationary and mobile shredders for waste management to complete systems for plastics and waste wood recycling and for producing solid recovered and refuse-derived fuels.

The Urraco is the name that covers its mobile twin-shaft machines, and it has been refreshed twice in a short period. Lindner launched the Urraco Evo series in October 2025, aimed at heavier jobs such as scrap metal, mixed scrap and aluminium, as well as wood, plastics and domestic and commercial waste. It then added the Urraco ECO, which it calls an entry-level model in the premium segment, for waste wood, green waste and commercial waste. The company says that came less than a year after the Evo.

The Micromat has a longer run behind it. At the K 2025 plastics fair, Lindner showed a fourth generation of this stationary single-shaft plastics shredder, built on Series III, with an adjustable rotor that changes between pointed and step knives. Another recent addition is the Merak, a universal shredder that the company says handles everything from coarse primary work to secondary shredding. A diesel-driven Merak 2800 followed at IFAT 2026 in Munich, for sites without a mains supply.

The other half of the business is plastics washing. Lindner Washtech was founded in autumn 2013 by Harald Hoffmann together with Manuel Lindner, according to a March 2025 company release, and it is based at Feistritz and at Großbottwar in Germany. It builds complete systems for shredding, sorting, washing and drying plastics. Its partnership with the Erema Group dates from 2023, the same release says, and later Lindner material calls the arrangement a joint venture. Georg Krenn took over as sole managing director in January 2025. Recycling Product News reported that the 2023 opening also celebrated ten years of the subsidiary.

Lindner’s own language around these products is consistent. Its releases return to phrases such as “recycling pioneer” and “proven Lindner quality,” alongside repeated references to being family-run and to making machines in Austria. Those are its own claims, but they are also what it chooses to put forward as a brand.

Crushers and shredders.

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.

A family business with its factories at home.

Lindner remains in family hands. HUB-4 described it in 2019 as 100% family owned, and Global Recycling named Manuel Lindner as chief executive and owner in 2020. Recycling Product News called him owner and managing director in 2023, and the company’s 2025 release again names him as owner of the Lindner Group. Michael Lackner has also been named as managing director in press reports since 2019.

Its generation count depends on which page is read. The company’s “About” text and HUB-4 both say the third generation runs the firm, while the company’s October 2025 Urraco Evo release calls it a business “now in its fourth generation.”

Lindner is explicit about where its machines are made. The October 2025 release says its shredders are exclusively manufactured in Austria, at sites in Spittal an der Drau and Feistritz an der Drau. Its company page says it still produces in Austria, on a total of 14,000 square metres, with robotics and automation in production and a high degree of in-house manufacturing. The independent reports fit that account: Global Recycling, working from a company statement in 2020, named the same two sites, and Recycling Product News said in 2023 that the new plant had more than doubled the production area to 14,000 square metres. HUB-4 visited Spittal in person in 2019 and described the Spittal and Feistritz sites as Lackner set them out.

Sales reach is wider. The company says it exports to more than 90 countries, and it announced a Latin American subsidiary, Lindner LATAM, based in Brazil. A release dated July 2026 from São Paulo describes work with Recupac there, tied to new recycling rules in Chile, Colombia and Brazil.

For a design guide, Lindner shows how a family name, a place and a set of memorable machine names can do the work of a brand system. Compare Vecoplan and UNTHA, two more makers of shredders. For this guide we use green, black and yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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