Vecoplan Brand Guidelines: The 1969 Westerwald Shredder Maker Owned by MAX Automation

A start with sawmills and furniture makers.

Vecoplan began in 1969 in Bad Marienberg, a town in Germany’s Westerwald uplands. The company’s own history says Irene Scheidweiler, then 22, founded it with two colleagues, and that the first machines went to sawmills and furniture makers in the region. An entry in the Höchsmann recycling technology lexicon gives the same year, town and first customers.

Early milestones, as Vecoplan lists them, moved from single machines to whole installations. The company delivered its first complete wood recycling plant in 1973. It started its own production in 1978, in a plant on the Eichenstruth industrial estate, and the administration followed in 1983. A new office building was finished in 1994, in time for the firm’s 25th anniversary. A first technical centre, where visitors could watch waste and recyclable materials being processed under working conditions, opened in 1996, and the company says exports passed half of its business in 1998.

The founder’s role was recognised outside the company as well. Vecoplan says Scheidweiler received the Business Medal of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2013.

Expansion abroad came in stages after 2000, the year the company and German Wikipedia both give for its American subsidiary, Vecoplan LLC, now based in Archdale, North Carolina. British and Austrian sales offices opened in the early 2000s and later became subsidiaries, in Birmingham in 2008 and Vienna in 2011. Spain followed in 2012 with a company in Bilbao, Poland in 2018 with one in Warsaw, Italy in 2021 and France in 2023, while an American office with a technology centre opened in Eastvale, California, in 2022.

A purchase in France came earlier. In July 2007, the trade service EUWID reported that Vecoplan, which already held a stake in TBM of Sierentz, had taken it over in full. Vecoplan’s own timeline also organises its work into two divisions, a 2008 split into “Wood” and “Recycling.”

From Wood to Refuse-Derived Fuel, With a Design Programme.

German Wikipedia describes Vecoplan as a maker of machines and plants that shred, convey, separate and process wood, biomass, plastics, paper, recyclable materials and household and commercial waste. The company’s product pages are arranged the same way, with shredding, conveying and cleaning as separate groups. Its shredders include single-shaft and double-shaft machines, along with chippers for wood and biomass.

The model names carry the catalogue. The VEZ single-shaft series grew out of an older machine and, Vecoplan’s timeline says, became a re-shredder in refuse-derived fuel processing. The VAZ is the waste shredder that the company says it completely redesigned, with new technology and a modern industrial design. The VHZ is a small series for woodworking businesses, and the VTH is its line of drum and biomass chippers.

The design story is the most useful part for a brand guide. Vecoplan’s timeline records the introduction of a “Corporate Industrial Design,” and gives its goal as a clear differentiation of its shredders from those of other makers. The first machine in that design was the VEZ 3200, a pre-shredder developed for refuse-derived fuel, which can also shred in a single stage.

That machine brought the company an award. In April 2020, Recycling Product News reported that the VEZ 3200 was among the year’s winners of the Red Dot Award for Product Design. Vecoplan worked on it with a machine-design firm, Design Tech. “For us, the design of the new VEZ 3200 was not all about appearance; ergonomics was also an important factor,” Werner Berens, then chief executive of the Vecoplan Group, said in the report. The report said Vecoplan saw the new look as setting it apart in both colour and geometry, and that it had changed several existing machine assemblies to carry the design across its range.

Later machines added new drives and new formats. Vecoplan calls its HiTorc system a drive that sends torque straight from the motor to the rotor shaft, without belts, couplings or gears, and in May 2025 it described the VTH 600-1050 BT biomass chipper as the first chipper fitted with it. In March 2026 it announced the VEZ 3300 e-mobil for that year’s IFAT trade fair in Munich, naming it the company’s first mobile shredder. Its August 2026 release put the VAZ 2500 on its stand for Ecomondo in Rimini that November.

Plastics are the newest strand. At IFAT in 2024, Vecoplan announced a strategic partnership with Pla.to Technology of Görlitz, a specialist in cleaning plastics, and it says Pla.to became a wholly owned subsidiary in 2025.

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 founder’s firm inside a listed holding.

Vecoplan has been a subsidiary since 1995, when, its history says, it joined MAX Automation, then a Munich company. The Höchsmann lexicon gives the same year, naming the parent as M.A.X. Automation AG of Düsseldorf, formerly M.A.X. Holding AG of Munich. German Wikipedia, citing MAX Automation’s 2023 annual report, says the holding owns all of it.

That relationship was still current in 2026. MAX Automation SE’s report on its first half, published on 31 July 2026, listed the Vecoplan Group as one of its segments, alongside bdtronic, ELWEMA and NSM + Jücker. The holding’s first-quarter report said its shares had moved from the Prime Standard to the General Standard of the Frankfurt exchange in March 2026.

The legal form changed in the same year. Vecoplan became a stock corporation in 2007, by its own account. On 24 June 2026 it announced that it would convert to a GmbH, saying that a stock market listing was no longer being pursued and that the conversion reflected a stable, long-term ownership structure. The company says the change took effect on 11 August 2026, and that customers and suppliers would see no operational change. So “Vecoplan AG,” the name on most older press coverage, is now Vecoplan GmbH.

Leadership also turned over. Berens was still chief executive in a release of July 2025. Eric Jaschke joined as chief financial officer in December 2025, according to the company, and Dr Ralf Guckert became chief executive after leaving MAX Automation’s managing directorate on 31 March 2026, the holding reported.

The main site remains Bad Marienberg. In July 2025, the company said it was enlarging Plant I there by 1,900 square metres, 850 of them for preassembly of heavy machinery, with a new warehouse for long materials; Wood & Panel reported the project on 31 July 2025. German Wikipedia refers to production and sales locations in eight countries without separating one from the other.

For a design guide, Vecoplan shows how a machine builder can treat industrial design as a company-wide programme, recorded in its own timeline and applied across model lines. Compare Lindner and WEIMA, two more makers of shredders. For this guide we use teal, ink and grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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