UNTHA Brand Guidelines: The Kuchl Shredder Maker Named After Two Local Surnames

A metal shop, a grocer and a request about crates.

UNTHA is a name built from two surnames. The shredder maker says it began in 1970 in Kuchl, near Salzburg, when Anton Unterwurzacher set up a metalworking shop with five employees. The second surname belongs to Christian Hasenbichler, who ran the local grocery store and wanted a way to dispose of his wooden crates and cardboard boxes. UNTHA says its registered trademark comes from “Mr UNTerwurzacher and Mr HAsenbichler,” and the trade magazine Recycling International gave the same origin in its 50th-anniversary feature in 2020.

Sources date the first machine differently. UNTHA’s own timeline puts the grocer’s request and the first shredder under 1981. The online woodworking-machinery lexicon Höchsmann gives an earlier sequence: the request in 1978, a first shredder delivered with an automatic incinerator in 1979, and the four-shaft system in 1980. Both accounts begin with the same crates and boxes.

The business grew in stages. UNTHA says it began building a sales network in Europe and America in 1986. In 1989 Anton and Anneliese Unterwurzacher founded Anton Unterwurzacher Maschinenbau GmbH, and the name UNTHA Shredders was introduced. The company moved to larger premises in 1991, opened a test centre in 2000, and adopted the present name, UNTHA shredding technology, in 2006.

In 2008 Unterwurzacher handed the management to Alois Kitzberger, a step UNTHA’s timeline labels a “generation change.” The company’s team page says Kitzberger has been there since 1997, and Recycling International confirmed in 2020 that he had held the post since 2008. The same page lists him as CEO today, with Andrea Gratzer as CFO and Kaspar Schober as COO; Stefan Scheiflinger-Ehrenwerth joined as Chief Innovation Officer ahead of IFAT 2024. UNTHA’s release on the 2025 employer ranking by the Austrian magazine Industriemagazin, in which it placed third, calls it “the Kuchl-based family business.”

Four shafts and a perforated screen.

The engineering claim at the centre of the brand is the four-shaft cutting system. Recycling International reported in 2020 that Unterwurzacher, with a background in special machine construction, spent more than a year on the grocer’s problem and arrived at what the magazine calls the world’s first four-shaft cutting system with a screen, patented in 1983. UNTHA’s timeline gives the same year and the same “world first.” Höchsmann describes the RS 30 of 1981 as the first series-produced shredder of that kind, and it dates the patented system to 1980, so the sources differ on the order of events.

The RS class remains in the range. Recycling International pictured a four-shaft machine shredding hard disks in 2020, and UNTHA launched a fourth generation of the RS class in 2024.

Around it, the range covers single-, two- and four-shaft machines, and the magazine reported that most are purpose-built. UNTHA says it launched the twin-shaft ZR series in 2021. In 2016 came the XR mobil-e, which UNTHA calls the world’s first mobile shredder with an electric drive; Höchsmann also calls it the first. The Power Core, a generator for running XR and ZR machines at sites without a power supply, followed in 2025. In 2026 the company added two classes, the single-shaft universal MR and the secondary SR.

The company says its machines handle material recycling, residual and waste wood, and the reprocessing of waste into alternative fuels. Two digital products sit alongside the hardware: GENIUS, a condition-monitoring tool that Recycling International described in 2020 as the “brain” behind each shredder, and the MyUNTHA customer portal, launched in 2024.

Two awards arrived in 2026, both reported by UNTHA. The SR3000 was among the projects honoured at the first Salzburg Innovation Award, presented by the provincial government, the Salzburg Chamber of Commerce and Innovation Salzburg. At Fakuma in Friedrichshafen, UNTHA Deutschland took the “Recycling” category of the first Fakuma Innovation Award with the MR 1800C PRO.

Design and documentation.

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.

One word at the core of the brand since 2010.

UNTHA’s positioning comes down to one word. Its timeline says that in 2010 “Reliability” was placed at the core of the brand, and the website calls UNTHA “The reliable brand.” The vision page says reliability is “our promise, our core message and the essence of our brand,” and mentions a book of more than 50 pages, a “Values, leadership and goals compass,” on how staff should deal with colleagues, customers and suppliers.

Visually, the website’s stylesheet sets a primary teal with a yellow as its secondary colour, and names Avenir as its typeface. Those are website settings rather than a published brand standard.

The manufacturing claim is specific: “All shredders are developed, manufactured and assembled at the Kuchl site.” Recycling International reported an 80% share of in-house production at Kuchl in 2020, with its own welding and paint shop and CNC machining centre, and UNTHA repeated the figure in its report on 2022. The same release recorded the purchase of Aigner Stahlbau Verkehrstechnik of Pöttelsdorf, in Burgenland, a steel fabricator founded in 1990 that had supplied UNTHA for many years. It makes machine components in volume and sends them to Kuchl for final assembly, and Kitzberger said the deal let the company expand beyond its limits at Kuchl.

Sales run through subsidiaries that UNTHA dates from 2007, starting with the United States, followed by the UK and Iberica in 2011, Poland in 2013, Germany in 2014 and Turkey in 2022. The company gives an export rate of around 90% and says it is active in more than 40 countries. It gives its workforce as 500; its timeline says it reached 250 in 2019. A Technology Innovation Centre at Kuchl is dated 2024 by Manufacturing Today and 2025 by UNTHA’s timeline.

For a design guide, UNTHA shows how a coined name and a single repeated word can carry an industrial brand. Compare Lindner, another Austrian shredder name, and WEIMA, a German maker whose name is also a contraction. For this guide we use a teal and a yellow with a deep pine, set with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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